Lost... Found...Taken

You may find this hard to believe, but when I was younger, I used to run 3-4 miles every day, do 200 push-ups, and 250 crunches; I meditated for 30 minutes-1 hour each day. I could even control my pulse rate and body temp with thought and concentration. And I kept up my routine regardless of rain, sleet, heat, or social obligations. I felt good.

That's not to say that these activities were easy. The first 200 yards of every run took determination to keep going, as did the first fifteen push-ups and the first fifty crunches. But anyone who exercises regularly knows that once you get past that hurdle, you get into "The Zone." The Zone is that place where you stop counting the steps you've taken, stop thinking about the catch in your side; you're movements become automatic; your mind drifts elsewhere or nowhere, and you just keep going. I liked The Zone.

But once I started undergraduate studies full time, I allowed time to become my master, and I lost The Zone. I just couldn't keep up with its rhythms.

Periodically over the last decade, I have tried to find my way back, but I could never quite get there. Stress or weather or just plain fatigue would push me off course again and again until I would give up the search, return home determined to try again the next day. But eventually I'd give in and stop looking.

That is, until the past few weeks. It started as a desire to get out... get out of the house, get out of town, just get out. I began taking my bicycle out to the bike path that runs by our house and going a short distance along it each day. It felt nice to be doing something, to be going somewhere but not going any place particular; I was just going. Every day, I'd go a little further and a little further, not out of any intention to do so, mind you. No. I was just enjoying myself, so I'd think, "Why not go just a few minutes more. I have time." Then one day this week, I realized I had found "The Zone." There it was on a bike path in California's central valley. Who knew?

The path is cracked and pitted by the merciless rays of the California sun, but I'm not bothered by the bumps. I speed along at a fairly quick pace, but I'm not pushing myself or the bike to our limits; I'm just cruising, knocking off the miles without even getting out of breath. I've been biking about 15 miles a day with virtually no effort, once I get beyond the confines of my neighborhood. I just roll through the farmland to the west of town and let my mind wander where it will.

Yesterday, I noticed the haze on the horizon. It was worse than the day before. Arnold Swartzenegger's drawling, broken English plays in my head, "All ov CAL-i-FORN-ia is full of smoke. De smoke is very bad for de health. It is not good to breath de smoke, especially for dose wit asthma." But I'm in The Zone. I don't care about smoke.

But today I could smell it as soon as I walked out the door. I'd gone about two miles when it enveloped me like a fog. I am one well acquainted with fog. It is my friend. So, I rode on, expecting to feel the cool moisture caress my skin, but instead there were stabs of pain as my lungs betrayed me, the acrid smoke palpably bitter in my mouth. My eyes began to burn. I had to turn back.

As I biked my way back to my air-conditioner-filtered home, I thought that this time, I had not lost The Zone; it had been taken from me. I had been forcibly ejected, and I'd only experienced it for such a precious little time. California sucks! And don't let anyone tell you differently.

Bi-coastal Disorder

I hadn't realized it had been so long since my last post. I've had things I could post about. For one, Darling Wife and I celebrated our third anniversary last week, and we spent a great deal of time reminiscing about our life together. We have certainly had some great times. Lots of stuff to think about there. And my father and stepmother visited us for the first time ever. In fact, I think it may have been the most time I've spent with my father in my life. Yeah, there was some bloggable material in there. But I just haven't felt like it. For the first time in years, I am really, really enjoying just being home, curled up on the sofa with a good book in my hand, puppies at my feet, and DW at my side. There is very little lure to a computerized escape.

But life is not all wonderful. If you've been following the news, you know that California is once again on fire. There is a sizable blaze in Napa Valley, pretty close to where we live. We aren't threatened by the conflagration, but the delta breeze that we usually value so much in the summer for it's cooling freshness is wafting smoke and fumes into our charming university town. The air is hazy and difficult to breathe. I am reminded again of how much I dislike it here.

And escape, blessed escape is on the horizon. My nephew has thrown us a lifeline in the form of a graduation invitation from upstate New York. Blessed child! We will be departing this inferno via a red-eye flight from San Francisco Thursday night and traversing the breadth of our nation for a few wondrous days on the opposite coast. In fact, we will be flying into our nuptial city, that fabulous old Puritan town, and driving the entire width of the great state of Massachusetts. Glory be! And though thunderstorms are predicted to dampen the affair, I think DW and I will welcome the mercy drops. I can almost feel my skin soaking up the heavenly moisture even now, and my nostrils inflate, drinking in the sweetly remembered scent of rain-soaked Berkshire forests.

It is a good thing we aren't taking the dogs or we might not return to this accursed land of flame and ash at the end of the earth. Does anyone know if you can Fed-Ex live animals?

Unread Books Meme

Thanks Michele for turning me onto this. It was fun. I'm not going to explain what it is because my three readers already know.

The rules:
bold = what you’ve read,
italics = books you started but couldn’t finish
crossed out = books you hated
* = you’ve read more than once
underline = books you own but haven’t read yourself

1 The ultimate hitchhiker's guide by Douglas Adams*
2 Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
3 The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini
4 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
5 Life of Pi : a novel by Yann Martel
6 Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
7 Crime and punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
8 One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9 Vanity fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
10 The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
11 Ulysses by James Joyce
12 War and peace by Leo Tolstoy
13 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
14 The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
15 Catch-22 a novel by Joseph Heller
16 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte*
17 The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
18 Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle I) by Neal Stephenson
19 A tale of two cities by Charles Dickens
20 The satanic verses by Salman Rushdie
21 Middlemarch by George Eliot
22 Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books by Azar Nafisi
23 The name of the rose by Umberto Eco
24 The Kor'an by Anonymous
25 Moby Dick by Herman Melville
26 The Odyssey by Homer
27 The Canterbury tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
28 Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
29 The hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
30 The historian : a novel by Elizabeth Kostova
31 Foucault's pendulum by Umberto Eco
32 Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand
33 The history of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding
34 The three musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
35 The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
36 The sound and the fury by William Faulkner
37 The Iliad by Homer
38 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf*
39 Emma by Jane Austen
40 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
41 Sons and lovers by D.H. Lawrence
42 Gulliver's travels by Jonathan Swift
43 The house of the seven gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne*
44 Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies by Jared Diamond
45 Dracula by Bram Stoker*
46 Lady Chatterley's lover by D.H. Lawrence
47 A heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers
48 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
49 The once and future king by T. H. White
50 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
51 To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
52 Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
53 Oryx and Crake : a novel by Margaret Atwood
54 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens*
55 Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
56 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
57 Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond
58 The corrections by Jonathan Franzen
59 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
60 Underworld by Don DeLillo
61 Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
62 The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck
63 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte*
64 The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake
65 The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells*
66 Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy
67 The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
68 Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
69 A portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce
70 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
71 The divine comedy by Dante Alighieri
72 The inferno by Dante Alighieri
73 Gravity's rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
74 The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
75 Swann's way by Marcel Proust
76 The poisonwood Bible : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver
77 The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel by Michael Chabon
78 Sense and sensibility by Jane Austen
79 The portrait of a lady by Henry James
80 Silas Marner by George Eliot
81 The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde*
82 The man in the iron mask by Alexandre Dumas
83 The god of small things by Arundhati Roy
84 The book thief by Markus Zusak
85 The confusion by Neal Stephenson
86 One flew over the cuckoo's nest by Ken Kesey
87 Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
88 Bleak House by Charles Dickens*
89 The system of the world by Neal Stephenson
90 The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and… by Brian Greene
91 Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
92 The known world by Edward P. Jones
93 The time traveler's wife by Audrey Niffenegger
94 The mill on the Floss by George Eliot
95 The English patient by Michael Ondaatje
96 Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
97 Dubliners by James Joyce
98 Les misérables by Victor Hugo
99 The bonesetter's daughter by Amy Tan
100 Infinite jest : a novel by David Foster Wallace
101 Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
102 Beloved : a novel by Toni Morrison
103 Persuasion by Jane Austen
104 A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess
105 The personal history of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens*
106 Tropic of cancer by Henry Miller

42 read, 9 of which I've read more than once. Like Michele, I have generally read them for study, but I did enjoy several of them and would have read them again for pleasure if there were but world enough and time.
3 started but not finished; however, I will say that this was not because I didn't like them. All of them were books read for school when I was younger, and I was forced to abandon them from time constraints. I would gladly pick any of them up again.
9 owned but not read. I think only one or two of them are actually mine. The rest belong to Darling Wife, and I think I would like to read most of them. In fact, she brought quite a few books into our marriage that fall into this category, and I wouldn't doubt that I've left some on this list un-underlined when they should be.
1 I hated. Proust... it was really, really dull. I guess I just didn't get into it.

Unlike Michele, I would like to read several on this list, and expect I will get around to many of them eventually.