With the devil that you've been dreadin'

2004-02-24 - 9:43 p.m.

I went to the library today. I returned The Golden Compass and checked out its sequel, The Subtle Knife. I was good in that this is the only book I checked out today (albeit only because the other books I was looking for weren't there), but I was bad in that I needn't have checked anything out at all. It took all my will power when I got home to not sit down and start that book immediately. Instead I started reading The Fellowship of the Ring. So far so good, although I'm just barely past the forward and the prologue (Hey, they were over 40 pages long). In the beginning of the copy I have, there's a forward from the author and he says that this story isn't allegory and there's no hidden meaning behind it, it's just a story that he had fun creating. I really like that. I always hated English class in high school because it felt to me that really all we were learning was how to spout bullshit. Not that spouting bullshit isn't a necessary skill in this world, but it bothered me that there had to be hidden meaning behind everything. Why can't we just leave well enough alone?

I jogged my 2.6-mile loop today and I did it in 24:45 which averages to 9:31 per mile. Was it just last week that I was complaining that no matter how hard I tried I still could never average less than ten minutes per mile? And now four out of the last six times I've jogged I've gone faster than ten minutes per mile. What happened? It took me most of January to break the 11-minute mile and most of February to break the 10-minute mile. Do you think by the end of March I'll have broken the 9-minute mile and be flirting with 8 minutes per mile?

After finishing today's jog, I've officially jogged over 100 miles so far this year. That's the same distance as from my house in the outskirts of Sacramento to the middle of San Francisco. I'm actually playing this game where I'm doing a virtual jog from my house to Seattle. No, San Francisco isn't on the way, but for quite some time going north from my house there's really nothing of interest. For example, yesterday I just jogged through Willows, virtually speaking. Ever heard of it? Didn't think so. I was thinking of somehow incorporating my virtual jog into this journal, but I'll have to think about how exactly to do that.