Busy busy

Since my last post I have:

• driven from Whangarei to Hamilton and back
  
• flown from Hamilton to Wellington and back
• marvelled at the warm, fine weather everywhere I went
• made a detailed plan for the next book I will print
  
• spent over $400 on groceries
• made 155 lamingtons, 70 asparagus rolls, 38 chicken rolls, 38 stuffed eggs and uncountable other party finger foods
  
• gave a speech at my daughter's 21st birthday party
• helped to facilitate a Cardy family reunion
• enjoyed seeing friends and family from all over New Zealand who came to celebrate
• been overwhelmed by support I received, especially from Al, Eleanor, Martha, Norman, Rena, Philippa, Liz and Bob
  
• listened twice to the best radio drama I've ever heard: April 25th, A True Fiction
• enjoyed the first installments of Prime Suspect and this year's Reith Lectures (Jeffrey Sachs)
• borrowed 12 books from 1 library and 3 friends (I am an addict, but a responsible one)
  
• chased four heifers around the orchard, discovered why the electric fence wasn't working and fixed it

Before my next post, I plan to:

• finish teaching notes for a class on making books and boxes
• print the cover, title page and colophon of CAPACIOUS
• paste, fold and sew the book blocks for CAPACIOUS
• pack for the next house sit and sort out my paper for storage
• complete the next stage of readying house and garden for the owner's return.

So that's why today's post is just lists. Sorry.

Real Letter Press

I don't know if you can tell, but I am grinning all over my face in this picture. I have just pulled my first successful print off the 'Arab', the platen jobber press, the real letter press machine that I have been itching to play with since I first laid eyes on it. The time was right today: I finally felt I'd learned enough about printing and presses to be pretty confident I wouldn't break anything if I had a go without supervision, and thanks to Al the whole machine was shiny clean inside and out.

First I extracted the chase from its bed, and laid in some simple text. Then I re-inserted the chase and inevitably, it wasn't as easy to put back in as it had been to take out. But I got there with some judicious wriggling and a little light banging.

Then I smeared some oily black ink onto the ink disc and started pumping the treadle to run the triple rollers through the ink. Tui, who was doing accounts in the office came out at this point to investigate the dulcet tones of the industrial age, and quickly made an adjustment that got the disc turning so that the ink would spread evenly across the rollers.

Then I fiddled about with the tympan paper which was pretty dusty and yuck, so I covered it with some clean paper and then started trying to figure out how to get the paper to meet the form. Tui and I tried slipping a range of unsatisfactory packing materials between the tympan and the platen but it wasn't until Neil arrived that the simple, elegant throw off mechanism became obvious (doh!).

Suddenly it worked, and worked perfectly. No messy proofs, no laborious hand rolling, just crisp, clear, black type instantly.

I am quite infatuated with the Arab and its simple, honest, strength, speed and accuracy. I'm sure I will love it even more when I have found a frisket and gauge pins, a bodkin and tweezers, some more quoins and a quoin key... and who knows, maybe even the brake!

But for now I am simply seduced, the way I have been before by certain other machines I have known intimately (a card folder in Boulder; a trench digger in upstate New York; the long honeymoon with my first food processor [hummus! peanut butter!]). Strangely I have never felt even remotely attracted to a car or a bicycle or a computer. I admit to being very fond of my cell phone and to yearning for an MP3 player, but no shiny electronic gadget has ever appealed to me as much as this old mechanical piece of cast iron.

PS If you want to see a wonderful photographic demonstration of letterpress in action (and lots of gorgeous and interesting art works) check out Aimee Lee, a performance and book artist based in the United States

Me and my sweet Arab

Magnolia Fruits

As you know I am a big magnolia fan and last year I announced the winner of the first annual Magnolia of the Year award. But it has recently become clear to me that I haven't really been paying attention to magnolias except for the obvious showy flowering season. I never knew they also have fabulous fruits, photographed here by Al. In my own defense, I think they don't fruit every year or surely I would have noticed them before. The wax eyes, grey warblers and thrushes have been waiting for this big event and are holding a magnolia fruit festival in the backyard of our current housesit, where one tree is incredibly heavily laden.

They are feasting on fruits that look like a cross between a purple kumera tuber and giant red raspberry. Each raspberry coloured nodule on the ripe fruit eventually bursts open to reveal a fiery orange berry, shaped like a pomegranate segment but opaque and glossy. These berries dangle enticingly from a fine yet strong white thread. Inside the thin skin is a juicy, creamy, citrus-scented flesh surrounding a large seed looking like a shiny black valentine.

I ask you, how much better can this tree get? Well, according to Megan, who is a scientist and should know, they are a prehistoric tree that has been doing their glorious thing for millions of years. Makes me glad to be able to take a turn as a resident of Planet Earth.

Jigsaw practice vindicated at last

I have always felt a tinge of shame that before I started making artist's books, one of my favourite pastimes was doing jigsaw puzzles. Jigsaws are so uncool and so pointless (at least cross stitch provides a finished product or television viewing provides cultural connection). From the very second I made my first book and knew I had found my calling, I dropped jigsaw from my life like the unneccessary time filler it was.

Not that I have got anything against puzzles. Sometimes in Classics bookshop I wistfully admire their high end jigsaw selection. It's just a matter of priorities. A good jigsaw puzzle experience occupies twelve or more hours and half a dining table. Since devoting my hours and table space to book making books is even more absorbing, challenging and fun than puzzling; and eventually might I end up with a finished book that I am really pleased with and sometimes other people admire and even want to buy... jigsaw puzzles lost their place in my life.

However typesetting, to my delight, turns out to have bit in common with putting together jigsaw puzzles. Just as important as getting all the letters to print in the right order is arranging the white space around the words. And that means filling in the chase (frame) with blocks of wood and strips of metal of varying sizes and shapes, wedging them so tightly that there is no chance of a slippery little lead letter shifting about during the printing.

As I sat there Friday afternoon, trying different pieces to see if they would fit around my LANGUID text, I finally felt that I had something to show for all my years of jigsaw puzzling: a well tested capacity for the patience, persistance and patterning inherent to typesetting. Not to mention being able to find it an enormously pleasurable activity.

Whangarei Floods

Northland is flooding, so I joined the exodus of people leaving work early, taking over an hour to drive the route that had taken me 20 minutes in the pouring rain a few hours earlier. Crawling along in eerie mid-afternoon twilight, swerving to avoid overflowing gutters, grateful for the visible presence of police and other emergency services, I mused on the word 'burst', brought to mind by the two once-were streams I passed on to get to my car.

As I do these days, I imagined selecting each letter from a case of lead type and that led me to thinking about all the ways I physically know the word 'burst'. My fingers touched typed it onto my knee. Then traced it in print and cursive handwriting. I tried to remember learning to say 'burst' and had a strong sense memory of popping spit bubbles. In what context would I have first heard the word 'burst'? Bursting elusive soap bubbles? The shock of burst balloons banging? Tight tummy bursting from too many biscuits? The grossness of bursting a boil? The awesome power of bursting stream banks?

I made it to the edge of town and then the traffic tailed off and the water on the road really got scary. I was strangely reassured that I was following a school bus (bursting with excited children leaning out the windows into the rain) who led me around, and sometimes through, some stretches of watery road I might not have dared to traverse on my own.

This last photo is my trusty school bus, passing a car that wasn't as lucky as me. Note the flooding all the way to the centre line.

Parenting a poem

This week I finally seemed to hit my stride with printing. I understood what I need to do to get the results I want and I got some traction with the book I am making.

What is interesting to me at the moment is how this poem, Powerful Words, which I have been fiddling with for some years is now becoming something greater in the process of making it into a book. I persisted with the poem because I could see it had unrealised potential, and enough depth to keep me coming back over and over again. Yet I chose it to make this first hand-printed book precisely because it was not what I would consider my best work. I didn't want to 'waste' one of my favourite poems on a project whose primary purpose is learning.

What this means is that the very qualities lacking in this poem that I'm practicing with are developing out of the process of giving it a physical presence. Perhaps any poem, or text, would flourish under the extensive consideration that this one gets as a practice piece. But in the long, thoughtful conversation I am conducting with printing, design and the text itself, the poem is not a passive text being manipulated by arbitrary processes.

The content of the book I am printing almost certainly would not have existed without the slow collecting of each wooden or lead letter from its compartment. The constraints of the chase, the jigsaw puzzle of furniture, the sticky ink, my inexperience, the available typefaces and presses create a space in which the poem tests its boundaries. Answers to the technical questions of size and shape and flow and colour are found not only in the text that I started with but the text that emerges in response to those questions.

It's a bit like being a parent watching their precocious child become an admirable adult.

Post-WOMAD Vegan Halavah

No letterpress last week as I went on a little holiday to WOMAD in Taranaki. Too many punters and dodgey weather but lots of friends to catch up with and a couple of outstanding acts: Mariza and Ensemble Shanbehzadeh. To tell the truth, one of my highlights was the peach halava on the Hare Krishna combo plate. I went back for seconds it was so good.

Once home again I looked on the internet for a halava recipe, and found a couple on HK websites which revealed the awful truth about halava that I had deliberately forgotten . Like most of the most delicious food in the world it consists mainly of sugar, butter and wheat (in this case, semolina). In its Hare Krishna combination this triumverate of ill health tastes like manna.

Undeterred by the relish with which the HKs describe the buttery-ness of their halavah I decided that I could live with the wheat/semolina and should try and invent a vegan version. I substituted rice oil for the butter and dates for the sugar and honestly, it is almost as good as the real thing. The slightly looser texture of my vegan halavah could be attributed to
a) not chanting the HK mantra as I stirred
b) the liquidity of oil compared to butter
c) the water that evaporated while cooking down the dates and was thus unavailable to be absorbed into the semolina.

My vote is for (c) and I have adjusted the following recipe to reflect that assumption. You may want to try chanting while you stir, just to be on the safe side.

Post-WOMAD Vegan Halavah
1 1/2 cups dates, finely chopped
1 3/4 cups water
1 1/4 cups semolina
120 ml rice oil
1 cup walnuts, coarsely chopped

Start simmering the dates in the water and leave them alone to melt while you do the following: Then put the oil and semolina in a larger saucepan over a very low heat. Stir frequently for ten minutes, nice toasty smells should start to waft. Throw in the walnuts with the semolina, turn up the heat a little and stir more regularly, making sure nothing sticks to the bottom of the saucepan. After another ten minutes of stirring (total of 20 minutes) it should smell good, not burnt. Take both pans off their heat sources. Pour the date water (which should be dark and syrupy) carefully onto the oily semolina and nuts. Expect lots of sizzling and spitting at first. Stir through then put back on a low heat stirring steadily until all the liquid absorbs into the grains, making a pudding-like consistency, pulling away from the sides of the pan. Then put a lid on, lower the heat as far as possible and leave for 5 minutes. Remove from heat and let sit another 5 minutes. Eat hot or warm or cold, it's all good.

Now I'm confident about the method I intend to try various combinations of fruits, nuts and spices (cardamon, almonds & apricots? cinnamon, walnuts & pears?) but not too often as I find this treat irresistable and simply couldn't stop myself eating out of the pot all afternoon until it was almost all gone and I hadn't left hardly any for Al.

A passion for printing

In my experience people who love hand printing or/or book binding love the craft in an extraordinarily generous way. The two organisations I belong to, the Association of Book Crafts and Te Kowhai Print Trust, provide incredible value for low membership fees, seem to run very efficiently on 100% volunteer efforts and welcome new members with warmth.

Since wading into the world of letterpress (has it only been a month since I started?) I've been touched by people both near and far who are willing, nay eager, to share their knowledge and even their time. This afternoon I went to visit Mr Murray Inder of Inprint Design who has been in the printing business since handsetting lead type was the norm. He showed me around his printery, patiently answering all my questions , demonstrating, naming, and explaining until my brain was full. Yet I know I have barely brushed the surface of his deep knowledge of all kinds of printing.

I especially appreciated his enjoyment of the vocabulary of printing that I too find extremely alluring. I have been attracted to words like frisket, tympan and quoin just because they are great words with letterpress associations but he knows what those things are and pulled them out of drawers to show me*. For me it was a thrilling hour in print heaven, and it can't have been too painful for Mr Inder because he offered to come along to TKPT and help me get the platen jobber press going there.

*He also showed me a flong which I hadn't heard of before and am not sure I really understand how it relates to letterpress but it wins the best printing word of the week prize, and can be made out of papier mache so it's extra cool.

Never argue with a poem that knows what it wants

A certain amount of reinventing the wheel is surely inevitable when one is learning an ancient craft without an expert teacher by one's side. I know I shouldn't feel embarrassed about not knowing things that become obvious as soon as pointed out. I appreciate that making mistakes is a time honoured way of learning. I am, in fact, exhilarated by the process of figuring things out for myself and I'm a courageous asker of questions to all and sundry. But heavens, last Friday was a slow clamber up the old learning curve.

I decided to work on my printing project first and my cleaning project second, which meant that only two drawers of lead type got the vacuum this week. It was lovely to don the printer's apron and set up the etching press in the relative cool of the morning. My two tone experiment worked like a dream so registration became nothing but a bad memory. But I just couldn't seem to get a crisp, even quality to my prints.

Rightly or wrongly I do have a tendency to blame my materials or equipment when things don't go my way. Irritatingly, the scrap paper I had fished out of the recycling bin at work seemed to take the ink much better than the nicer cartridge paper I was planning to use- something to do with the smoothness of the surface I think. I ended up with a lot of prints but none I would bind since the ones on marked and creased scrap paper look better than the ones on clean paper.

It's not that I don't like the imperfections, I think they look edgy and interesting as well as ugly and dirty. I can imagine circumstances in which I would use prints like that, for example in works relating to punk, protest or peripatetic* discomfort . But I want to be able to choose where I use that effect, not just impatiently tolerate my beginner's incompetence.

Expert advice arrived after I had started cleaning up and pointed out a couple of variables that either I hadn't thought of (adjusting the felt) or given enough attention to (pressure). So maybe it's not necessarily a paper problem that's causing my prints to look like crap. These are all factors that require further testing next time. One sensible thing I did manage to do was take copious notes on each print about what I was doing to produce such crap images.

On the other hand, it's amazing how much better the printed text looked as soon as I folded the pages into vertical quarters. On the flat paper the words are, well, flat. In the mountains and valleys of an accordion fold the words march along full of rhythm and energy. The text stands up proudly and somehow manages to look crisper. It's as though the poem is rejecting the passive structure I had been planning and is demanding to be housed in a much more dynamic book.

*My newest best word... means itinerant.

Letter Press Therapy

I couldn't help myself, the steering wheel seemed to have its own volition, swerving through rush hour traffic into the turning lane that would take me to the Quarry instead of home from work. Tired and agitated from a demanding, complicated day in the office I was nonetheless drawn back to TKPT for 'just a quick visit'.

After a weekend's pondering on a possible bypass to the registration challenge that blighted my Friday's work I had to test my theory, just to be able to sleep at night before my next LetterPress Friday. Sure enough, my hunch proved correct and the wooden type and the lead type are very sensibly the same height, which means (theoretically) I can set them together, ink them carefully with different colours and make one print... no registration issues!

Naturally I couldn't stop at just measuring the two kinds of type, I had to have a fiddle and see how they would fit together. Twenty or thirty minutes of happy jigsaw-puzzling ensued until I was assured it would work, but wasn't something to try and complete in a hurry. Back in the car, I discovered my day's tension had slipped away, like the syrupy traffic at 6.00.

Once home I found this lovely email from my dad, sharing part of his life I never knew of:

You reminded me of how I learned to set type in Montauk junior high school. Print shop was the only one I really enjoyed and learned anything useful from. Woodworking and electrical wiring were not my forte. But using the old fashioned type fonts and presses has always helped me visualize the beginnings of print culture.

Steep

Reflecting on my second LetterPress Friday I can see at this point I am learning more about myself than I am about printing. And I'm learning a lot about printing. And cleaning.

Practically the first thing I did when I arrived was devise a filter for the vacuum cleaner nozzle (isn't nozzle a great word?) which enabled me to vacuum the dust out of cases of lead type without ending up with a vacuum bag full of pied type. This was a much quicker and cleaner method than the others I considered (e.g. tipping it all out to brush clean) or tried (e.g. blowing with a hairdryer). It still took the better part of four hours to clean 13 drawers of one cabinet. Oh, but that cabinet is not only usable but positively inviting now (especially since Shonah cleaned the outside while I did the insides).

After that exercise I am, inevitably, much more comfortable with finding my way around the cases of type now. I had imagined that learning to typeset would be like learning to touch type but it turns out that the type drawers are not necessarily arranged identically. The lowercase letters are consistent but the uppercase, punctuation and numbers seem a bit more random. Finished with cleaning for the day, I set four lines of type, in a conveniently generous 30pt Univers (sans serif much like the big wooden blocks I used last week).

Ah, this is what I'd been waiting and working for: An encounter with my text slowed down to a thoughtful search for each letter. Remember your first attempt to write with a keyboard? Imagine that initial hunt and peck exercise slowed by a lack of labels, and the requirement to make sure each piece of type is oriented correctly. Imagine putting together words and sentences backwards. Imagine handling slivers of punctuation the width of matchsticks. Imagine having to insert tiny blocks of lead between words and line to make spaces. It's slow, labourious, painstaking work, especially the first time. Not coincidentally these are the qualities of craft I most like to ground my imaginative work with.

Thanks to Shonah's proofreading (note to self: don't try this without a proofreader who can read backwards) I was ready to try overprinting onto the big grey CAPACIOUS I printed last week. There are a lot of variables to consider in printing and registration was the one I was least interested in, since (perhaps erroneously) I didn't anticipate overprinting to play a big role in my letterpress future. The sugar paper to hand last week when I had my first go at printing is perhaps too rough for the fine detail of lead type, and is such poor quality that I felt little of the perfectionism that drives me when working with $4 sheets of paper. Then there was the mid-afternoon Northland summer heat drying up the ink and making me feel hot and bothered. Suffice to say I wasn't getting the results I wanted and I couldn't/wouldn't/didn't figure out what to change.

Nothing is ever wasted and forty-eight hours of subsequent reflection have milked extraordinary value from my second LetterPress Friday. In response to the technical experience and challenges of the day I have developed a detailed plan for the book that will contain CAPACIOUS and my other powerful words, including paper, structure, size, type and (loosely) colours; and game plan for making it.

Mulling over my feelings, reactions and decisions during the day I had an insight about my art practice. I like to work alone and this is how I've always made the books I care about. When I work alone I have clarity and focus, courage and insight. I set my own pace and rhythm. But I also enjoy company during some aspects of book making. Particularly while learning this new skill I need and appreciate being around people with knowledge who can help and advise me. And I like Shonah and Toa and the other people who hang out at TKPT. So my challenge is to bring into the shared studio all my own clarity and focus, courage and insight, and a commitment to trusting my own pace and rhythm. I have a feeling that if I can achieve that, there will be a ripple effect enhancing many other areas of my life.

Lost blogger found at Quarry

I didn't intend to give the impression that I had run away to America. The last two posts were old poems from my last trip there and I was simply reheating them before getting back in the Bibliophilia kitchen, having realised with shock that nearly a month had passed since my previous post. Poor hungry readers, I'm sorry for neglecting you! But trust me, most of that month would have been even more dreary to read about than it was to live*, so we are moving right along folks, into a fine future!

For a long time I have wanted to be able to print the text in my books manually rather than photographically/digitally. Earlier attempts to get ongoing access to letterpress tools and experience were unsuccessful, but my entrance to the Te Kowhai Print Trust (TKPT) illustrates the truism that when it's the right thing at the right time everything happens easily.

TKPT is located in a couple of good sized buildings in the Quarry, a fantastic arts complex tucked into the bush a few minutes walk from downtown Whangarei. TKPT has, amongst numerous treasures for print and paper makers, a goodly variety and quantity of lead type, a cabinet of delectable wooden type and a letterpress printing press. I get the impression that things in general have been a bit quiet lately at TKPT (which has been around for 20 years or more) and no one seems to have touched the type for quite a while.
This is me, near the end of my first full day of play and work at TKPT, thrilled to have printed one of my best words. I spend my first morning exploring Cabinet Two, the most accessible of the 5-6 cabinets of lead type, and beginning to clean and sort its contents. I familiarised myself with trays of dusty spacers and furniture (slivers of metal and blocks of wood used to keep the letters wedged in the right place for printing). Some of these were glued into sticky masses by some unidentified substance that proved no match for vegetable turps and a lot of rubbing. Most of the filth was eventually transferred to my skin and clothes as I became intimately familiar with these useful little things.

Unfortunately, the press designed for the lead type needs a bit of fiddling with before I can start printing so I hadn't expected to actually be able to produce anything on my first day. But the lovely Shonah Scott, who was coaching me, suggested that I have a go with the wooden type that can be printed on the fully operational etching press (pictured below).
The wooden type are poster sized fonts carved out of blocks of hard wood, ranging from 12cm sans serif caps down to a cute chunky 4cm Goudy. I have an idea for a large format book, or perhaps a series of posters, showcasing the big wooden type with a poem called Best Words, so I didn't hesitate in deciding to try laying out the first page. Unfortunately, I discovered that these wooden founts come with only 3 'A's and I needed five for what I was planning. No problem, I had a plan B for a layout which is probably more interesting anyway, involving overprinting. So I spelled out CAPACIOUS backwards in the biggest typeface only to discover that it didn't fit the available tray. The nice thing about playing with these big letters is the lack of fiddly-ness in undoing one approach and trying another.

My next layout was good to go, and Shonah showed me how to set up the etching press and roll out the ink. Because I plan to overprint in black, I wanted a light colour for this first layer of text. Shonah suggested grey and I instantly visualised a kind of dull metalic grey that would compliment the letters' size and shape (think old fashioned newspaper posters). This looked grand on the various bits of coloured paper we tried, especially the leaf green.

By then it was growing late, I was pooped and Shonah had places to go and people to see, so we called it a day. I left with the kind of exhausted contentment that only comes from working very hard at exactly the thing you want to be doing. I can't wait for next Friday (my regular day for playing at TKPT) so I might have to pop in during the week and visit with my lovely sheets of CAPACIOUS and perhaps open a cabinet drawer and let some letters run through my fingers.

*No offence to all those lovely people whose company illuminated the general dreariness.

The shore of the night

Flying out of the night

into a dawn as sharply defined

as the edge of the cloud’s shadow

surrendering to a sky the colour of fruit

stretching steadily before us

silhouetting the curve of the earth.

Noisy New York

New York is noisy

we have to raise our voices

talking while we walk

through Monday night East Village.

The moon shines in slivers of a brown sky without stars

But the stores are full of sparkly costume jewellery

In Laura’s loft

even the floors tell stories,

each step a multitonal squeak .

There can be no secret movements in this place

Every trip to the bathroon is heralded by

the spongey floorboards

that bounce like a swingbridge

collecting my stories

to add to their anthology of travellers tales.

Swim Fan

I mentioned a couple a months ago that I have done an about face in my attitude towards home owning. It seems that I am in the process of overthrowing a number of prejudices that I once fiercely cherished and defended. Today's demonstration of this phenomena involves swimming.

Like many kiwi kids I was given formal swimming lessons and by about 7 or 8 years old I could manage a length or two of the school pool in a thrashing motion that bore some vague resemblance to the crawl or sometimes breast stroke or back stroke. I liked hanging out at the public swimming pool across the bridge from our house, but I didn't really do much swimming there, mostly just solitary play, imagining myself as a synchronised swimmer making endless somersaults in the water.

By high school my aversion to sports of any kind was pretty much complete, wearing a swimming suit was a source of humiliation, and my long, thick hair weighed a tonne when wet and took at least 4 hours to dry. So all in all, swimming became a rare and not very attractive activity. There was a brief interlude of early motherhood when taking my daughter to the pool was an excellent thing to do, but sitting in the toddlers pool doesn't really count as swimming for grown ups does it?

Fast forward through a couple of decades of excuses (I don't like the chlorine, the water's too cold, I won't have time to dry my hair properly etc) to January 2007. I had spent New
Year's Eve alone with a hole in my foot from falling on a pronged garden tool that afternoon. For the next two weeks I avoided walking, usually my main exercise, and while I was lying around I brainstormed alternative exercises that wouldn't involve my left foot in any weight-bearing commitments. The idea of swimming swum up from the depths of my imagination, and somehow avoided being snagged on all the reasons I didn't like it. Helpfully, the weather in Northland this month is exceedingly hot, and the idea of immersing myself in a cool, refreshing body of water suddenly had unprecedented appeal.

I found an enthusiastic buddy (with spare goggles), a mutually convenient time and made my first visit to the public pool in Whangarei. I swam six lengths of the 25 metre pool that day, with plenty of rests in between. It took a few lengths before I remembered how to co-ordinate breathing with all the arms and legs flailing about, but eventually it got easier. I was so satisfied with the experience that my buddy and I made a regular swim-date. The second visit was harder work somehow but I made it to 11 lengths (over 1/4 km!) and have set a goal of 16 for next week.

Yes, the chlorine is yucky, yes my wet hair is like wearing a horse on my head for the rest of the evening, yes I'm self-conscious about my hirsute thighs and flabby torso... but now the pleasure of of moving through the water towards my goal of increased fitness carries more weight.