Saturday, June 07, 2008

Post Number One Hundred

Hello Blog,

My wife and child have been away on a mini vacation for 2 days now. I guess that means that I'm decompressed enough to write a blog entry. All this solitude is sure weird on the mind. Granted, I've been sick and that's a large part of my foggy headedness, (spell check doesn't like my new word) but I don't think I function very well in the absence of family. I don't tend to get much done. All this free time and no motivation. It'd be funny if it weren't so annoying.

I guess I'm being hard on myself. I am sick and I did get a lot of reading done today. I finished reading "Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before" by Tony Horwitz which I started three weeks ago. I don't get a lot of reading done when the family is around. It was a fun read. I think that it's anecdotal style gave me a much better sense of Cook that I previously had. I've also been listening to Horwitz' previous book "Confederates in the Attic" as an audio book for the past few weeks. I'm enjoying it also though not as much as the Cook book. God, I loved getting to type that last sentence. I swear that that was unintentional.

I went for a long walk tonight instead of running like I usually do and it was nice. I walked along the railroad tracks that pass near my house. Don't worry, there are almost never trains on them. I had been wanting to do that soon because I'm afraid that it's going to become a much more dangerous affair once Tacoma Rail opens up its new logistics center or whatever-the-hell-it's-going-to-be in Maytown. The whole time that I'd been envisioning the facility I'd been mistakenly thinking that the rail line in question was the BNSF line that AMTRAK and all the other north-south freight in the region runs on. Unfortunately, no. The line that they're talking about expanding is the hitherto derelict very same (duh) Tacoma Rail line that runs 400 yards from my house. Bummer. That is going to be loud. And inconvenient. The tracks cross lots of roads in the Yelm-Rainier-Tenino area with only cursory crossing signs. Lots of people have little or no memory of trains passing by. I foresee a lot of accidents.

Anyway, I took a very nice walk on the tracks since I might not have very long to do so in relative safety. It was a nice night for it.

I'm off to bed.