Friday On My Mind

Morning weigh-in: 178#, 12.5% BF

The VMB meeting was last night, a the Windsor Hotel. Meeting started at 7:00 PM, pre-meeting meeting for racers at 6:30, but I got there at 6:00 for some dinner. Hung out with Doug, Rich B, and a few other early arrivals.

The meeting itself: was good. John E (one o the Salisbury trail dudes) ran the meeting rather than prez Joe T, since he wanted to see about imposing "Robert's Rules" on the proceedings and also act as an umpire rather than someone with their own agenda. Lots of stuff to cover, plenty of debate, things got tedious at times and cantankerous at others, but most of the meeting agenda was worked through. Very fruitful meeting.

Reading: nothing, gotta find a new book.

Listening: nothing, I gotta get some new music.

Tonight: Firkin Friday at Which Brew, cask-conditioned ale, but no music. Maybe go to Porters, or Bluetone instead? Actually, it's also laundry night.

March Madness

Morning weigh-in: 177.5#, 11.5% BF

No exercise this morning, no meeting last night: got a call from Doug, we were supposed to grab some dinner before the VMB meeting, but he discovered (via Greg H) that the meeting was actually scheduled for today, caught me just before I left the house. So OK, tonight is Take #2.

Linux/BSD/Solaris Voyager: So instead, I surfed. Mostly I surfed that is, then I ssh'ed to my account at SDF (a BSD system) and fiddled with various settings, then telnetted over to the epix.net machines (they run Solaris), fiddled with stuff there. (Funny how epix doesn't have ssh & I have to use telnet, but then they refuse any connection that isn't coming from their dialup connection, maybe that's "secure.") Mostly just bash & configuration experiments; if I were playing music it would have been called "noodling." (I use Linux at home, and hit the other major flavors of Unix in one night, but since I use bash -- with a similar configuration -- on all three, they all act pretty much the same.) From there, I decided to change the way Emacs looked on the home computer, played around, noticed it was 1:00 AM, went to bed.

Pre-Cambrian: Strange dream this morning, just before I got up (technically, it was after I got up for the first time), all I can remember was beach imagery, and the words "phylum" and "radial symmetry."

A change in the weather: Went out to my car at lunch. Very windy -- it would be "good kite weather" if it weren't bitterly cold... Still, there's something you can feel in the air, despite the cold & even with all the snow on the ground: spring is on its way.

Idleness

Morning weigh-in: 177.5#, 15.5% BF

Got home yesterday, there must have been a power outage: clocks were blinking and the computer was turned off -- after being up for 93 days straight. Dang! Got that up again, surfed and read for a while, then went out to Which Brew for dinner after finishing Chancellorsville 1863; the usual crowd was there though I arrived a little late. Salad, bowl of chili, some Troeggs cask-conditioned ale, tasty.

Today's probably the last day without exercise, I'm feeling pretty good again and starting to want to do stuff (a good sign). Tonight is the VMB meeting and I want to go (haven't been to one in over a year), so nothing until tomorrow. Maybe a morning run?

Snow!!

Morning weigh-in: 178#, 12.5% BF

A big nor'easter, aye matey, dumped about 8" of snow last night. Snow emergency in Easton/Wilson, tough parking but the streets were in great shape this morning.

Go Tell It On The Mountain

Morning weigh-in: 175#, 4.5% BF (WTF?)

Not likely weigh-in numbers: didn't eat yesterday except Taco Bell around 7:00, still affected by medications, especially GI situation with antibiotics. Scale says one thing, mirror tells a different story, hopefully my downtime weight loss doesn't include too much muscle. Meantime, dehydration sometimes lowers body fat analysis numbers, must drink more fluids...

I got a haircut on Saturday, usual place at the Palmer Park Mall; the receptionist said it'd be an hour wait so I wandered around, found myself in the bookstore. I remembered a book I'd heard about, asked for it, and yes they had it in stock so now it's mine -- I basically did nothing but read it for the rest of the weekend. Holy living fsck...

By the way, the book is Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell (here's a better review).

It's basically a set of six linked stories: a diary of an 1850's South Seas journey jumps to the letters of a British ne'er-do-well and composer in 1930's Belgium, then to 1970's California for a battle between a reporter and a nuclear power company, modern Britain, a nightmare futuristic "corpocracy" in Korea, and the center of the book, a post-apocalyptic Hawaii maybe a thousand or so years into the future. Each section, except the Hawaiian one, got only halfway into its story before jumping to the next; then after the Hawaiian story completes, the book runs backward through the sections, completing each story and finishing, back on Hawaii, with the South Seas journal. So what's the book about? Well, each story is about enslavement and the struggle to escape it, each in a different but thematically linked way.

The whole thing was sort of like climbing up and down a mountain, and at the "top" of the book the iron-age protagonist climbs Mauna Loa, with a woman from the last outpost of advanced civilization. (There are several other places and times where a man and a woman ascend to find some revelation, which may or may not be correctly understood.) But climbing down is always very different than going up, and a bit of an anticlimax, and that's the way the book was -- it was probably deliberate too, for reasons I won't mention because it'll give away some of the surprise. I'll just say though, that each section is written the way it's supposed to be, and it was a page-turner all the way to the end...