ReReading

This morning I started a new book by Alice Hoffman called Blue Diary. I keep a log of everything that I've read since around 1986 but I didn't check that I had read this before since it was on my list of things to read (as you can tell I'm a manic list keeper). The book seemed naggingly familiar so I did check my books read list and I had indeed read it 5 years ago.

Back then I only gave it a rating of 6. It must have been pretty bad because I really have no recollection of the story other than I don't like her extreme descriptions of things. Here's an example:

On this glorious day the brilliant sky is filled with banks of motionless white clouds fleecy as sheep but so obedient and lazy they haven't any need for a shepherd or fence.

See what I mean? This was clever the first time but not so much on a second reading. It's back to the library tomorrow for some fresh reading material.

Dog Days

Last year we raised a puppy for The Seeing Eye. Back in October we got to see her working in harness and were assured by her trainer that she was ready for service. Last night we got a call that she was being dropped from the program because she was "aggressive" to other dogs.

What I really think happened was that she got caught in a surplus of dogs and she just was too long at the kennel basically negating all of the good we had done by home raising her for a year and a half. When a dog washes out the family that raised her gets the right of first refusal. We spent the last 24 hours agonizing about whether we wanted to take her back. In the end, we realized that we do not have the time or patience for this. It's a hard decision since we were really quite fond of her but I, at least, was not prepared for a 12 plus year commitment. We simply are not around enough and to add this to our burden didn't seem fair to us or the dog.

I'm sure The Seeing Eye will find her an excellent home.

I think that I'd be willing to raise another puppy but I like the idea of a short term pet.

Running in the AM

Since I was a teenager I've been running. What I mean by that is that I take it up from time to time and then sometimes lapse. I always come back to it. I can only run in the morning, though. I attribute this to the fact that if I really wake up I'll talk myself out of doing it. It's only something I can do when I'm semi-conscious.

I don't know if it is psychological but when I'm running regularly I have a more positive outlook on life. I've been going out pretty consistently 4 - 5 times a week for the past month. My route these days is around the neighborhood and then for 2 laps around the middle school track. Sometimes I think wistfully of my days of running along the Brighton Beach Boardwalk. End to end that was 2.5 miles so a round trip gave me a 5 mile run. Nowadays, I'm running about 2.5 miles in the morning. I'm hoping to keep at it long enough so I can run 4 miles each morning. The goal will be a 10K race in the fall.

The trick for me is to get in "the zone". This means that I sort of forget I'm running and just think deep thoughts with no interruptions. Running in the early morning is good for that since I don't have to compete with much traffic.

Bicycling

The weather was glorious this past weekend. I managed two extended bike rides on the roads of Sullivan County, New York. I even managed to travel a route that I'd never been on before.

On Sunday there were three pancake breakfasts listed in The River Reporter. Two of them I had travelled to before but one was new to me. On the pancake breakfast scale it rated pretty low but on the scenic bicycle ride scale it was one of the best. It was in a place called Kaneounga Lake which is not far from the Woodstock Music Fair Site (We are stardust, we are golden). It was about 12 miles each way. It was just enough to work up a good appetite but there were no hills that made me wish I'd stayed home.

The pancakes were fair and unlike the other "all you can eat" events we were restricted to one helping. The breakfast was to benefit the volunteer fire department so I don't begrudge them their fee. It simply did not compare to the pancakes that you can get in Obernberg, NY the site of one the competing breakfasts. That, in my mind, is the mother of all pancake breakfasts at least in the Sullivan County Catskills.

Yesterday morning I ventured down to Narrowsburg, NY on an early morning bike ride. It's such a sleepy pretty town. The Main Street Cafe was not open for breakfast so we just got a coffee and breakfast sandwich at the trendy coffee place Roasters. It was enough of a boost to get me back up the hills to Lake Huntington. It wasn't enough though to make me think midway that I really needed pancakes to do this ride.

Power

Juneau Alaska, according to an article in The New York Times of May 14, 2008:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/us/14juneau.html

gets 80% of its electric power from a hydroelectric dam 40 miles from the city. This is a good thing, right? An avalanche, though, knocked out most of the transmission towers and the city had to fall back on other sources until June. Mostly, people had to come up with other ways of doing stuff; clotheslines instead of electric dryers, dimming lights, running only one elevator in places where there are two.

What I get out of this is that we probably can do with a lot less power and fuel than we are willing to admit. It does, however, take a crisis for folks to realize this. You would think that $4 a gallon gasoline would get people to consider alternatives but perhaps that will only happen when they just can't get gas. I'm sort of looking forward to that day.

I'm Back!

I hadn't really disappeared, just from the blog. It's not that I've had nothing to write about but my laziness has overwhelmed me a bit. I've spent too many evenings watching old Star Trek (the original series) on DVD. I am vowing now to be more productive.

I'm currently reading a travel book called Tales From the Torrid Zone by Alex Frater. It's a bit of a memoir and a bit of a guide to the strange part of the world between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. From this comes a thought for the day. The author is contemplating life in the tropics, noting how there is a very obvious interplay between rotting things and growing things,

"... man's ultimate role, I told myself, is to supply the trace elements which nourish higher plants and lower animals. Each of us ends up fertilizing something, yet in the tropics it's all so wildly accelerated the whole region seems to be feeding constantly on itself."

That made me stop and think for a few minutes. Then the bus got to the bus station and I went to work.

Writing

A few years ago at work I proposed an idea to the senior management of my department to put out a department newsletter. The notion developed out of a company survey that revealed, among other things, that for a communications company we did a very poor job of communicating with our own employees. From my own experience I realized that there were people who sat only a few feet from my cubicle whose names I didn't know and I had no clue what they did.

From that was born a internal publication called Ping! In computer jargon ping is a way for computers to establish communication with each other. We published about 9 issues but the effort fizzled last January because the small group that had formed to produce it couldn't generate enough content and we were not being given any time to work on it.

This year, as part of our company's diversity initiatives (which are now called diversity and inclusion), we convinced our management to allow writing for this publication to be counted as meeting a diversity goal. Today we had an organizational meeting and we lined up a whopping 14 articles for the next issue to be published in June. I may not be embarking on a writing career but I'm at least keeping my hand in something close to it.