Got Some

Just catching my breath a little from a busy day of soccer-related activities. I actually need to hit the hay around 10 tonight because I'm getting up at 5 a.m. tomorrow. Every year I volunteer to help out at the Nahant 30K. Last year, I got totally soaked because it poured the whole time and it looks like it'll be that way again tomorrow. Lovely.

So as much I felt pretty good running Reach the Beach last weekend, I was pretty sore for a few days afterward. Ended running Tuesday, skipping hockey Wednesday because my legs were really tight, and running Thursday, Friday and today. I'm still toying with the idea of running a half marathon this fall. One possibility is the Manchester Half on November 1. We'll see.

I finally finished Infinite Jest this week, only two days after the Infinite Summer deadline. Not bad: 1079 pages in three months. Given everything I had going on and the usual glacial pace of my reading, it was more than I could have hoped for. Even better, I really enjoyed the book. David Foster Wallace wrote it in 1996 and foresaw a lot of stuff, including the corporatization of America, our increased dependence on pharmaceuticals and the use of entertainment to calm and distract the masses. An amazing read. The group has already planned its next group read: Bram Stoker's Dracula for the month of October. I'm going to skip that because I have a stack of books on my nightstand I need to get to, but I expect to join them to read the next book, Roberto Bolano's 2666, in January. Having the deadline and reading the discussion really helps push me to keep reading when normally I would just blow it off.

Since Apple rolled out iTunes 9 recently, I've been enjoying the Genius function, which creates mixes from your iTunes collection based on individual songs you select. Today, I used David Bowie's "DJ" as a jumping off point and Genius created a great mix that included this classic: