— Month of March workout totals: Swim-1; Bike-3; Run-4; Lift-3; Yoga-0; Pilates-5; Lupus-3
— Another constructive “March Experiment” is under my belt, but it may be no longer accurate to call it an experiment. In its current form, the regimen has become more of an annual exercise. Perhaps next time around I shall discover and impose a breakthrough to make it truly experimental again.
— Brendan stopped by today on his way west (Way, Way West), and it felt good to personally wish him Godspeed. He loaned me his copy of Watchmen, and we also talked a bit about The Book of the New Sun. I asked him if he’d packed plenty of listening material. He said he would be playing his CD of a popular presidential candidate reciting “99 Bottles.” (Yeah, that last thing was a lame April Fool’s joke. I got Dana with a much better one this morning.)
— With the price of gold hovering near a generational high, the Graybeard Prospector turned over a new leaf last month, using every trick he could think of to see if he might stake some new claims. In the process, he connected with some new friends and old, including one from the Cincinnati days. His former pal Ray is working on a book with photographs of drive-through expresso shacks, which apparently are a feature of the American Northwest. Based on this information, it looks like Nephew B has hit the trail for the caffeine mother lode. We’ll see if he can stay clean and somber.
Five years ago — 4/1/03
— When will the turning point in the war come, and will we even recognize it when it does? Today the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs made an animated defense of Rumsfeld, Franks, and the war plan, in response to aggressive media criticism. It’s amazing to me how the press is behaving at a time of war… Today Dana and I had lunch at the Carnegie Club, listening to a superb presentation by Vince about the music of Duke Ellington, but a lot of it was autobiographical. He talked more than I expected about his youth and evolution as a musician, as well as his attitude toward teaching—clearly the real passion for him.
Ten years ago — 4/2/98
— The new Mac is sitting on a chair in the conference room, unpacked but unplugged. The workload is just now easing up enough to consider tearing into our current configuration… It’s time for me to set it up. I should be more excited, but I usually feel this way—a bit nervous—when I have to disrupt an existing system. The excitement will come later.