Exercise and Reading

I walked around the park with my friend and his dog for about an hour today.  It was in the upper 70s, but not too bad.  I do have leash burn on the back of my leg, though.  The dog got way too excited and ran around me, so ouch.

I’ve finished several books lately:  the first Dresden Files book, the first Mysterious Benedict Society book, the second and third Percy Jackson books, and Sunken Treasure.  Out of the group, I enjoyed The Mysterious Benedict Society the most.  I’ll definitely pick up the second one at some point, and hopefully I’ll continue to enjoy the series through the 3rd that I have from iTunes.  The Percy Jackson books are definitely better to read in print than to listen to on audio.  Definitely much quicker to read.  I now understand why The Lightning Thief was such a short audiobook.  It looks like all the Percy Jackson books are under 200 pages so far.

Healthy Habits

Kes moved the stationary bike to the living room today.  It has been in the spare bedroom, which made it even more difficult to work up the gumption to use it.  To celebrate, I rode for 20 min while Kes watched Arrested Development.  I’m still working on developing/keeping healthy habits, so hopefully having it in the living room will be one more motivation.

On the unhealthy side, I nearly always eat processed food for lunch.  One way I’m trying to be healthier is by trying to eat less processed food.  In pursuit of that goal, I have packed both breakfast and lunch for tomorrow (I go to work early enough that it’s easiest to eat breakfast at work rather than at home).

Breakfast:
Quesadilla: 1 whole grain “soft taco” tortilla, small amount of low fat cheddar cheese, thin spread of pesto, and chopped chicken breast

Lunch:
noodle dish:  about 1/3 brick of ramen noodles soaked in water until softened then tossed in about 1/4 teaspoon sesame seed oil, cubed chicken breast, peas, and minced garlic
salad:  baby spinach, button mushrooms, with a side of basil parmesan vinaigrette
fruit side: avocado (I originally planned on having a clementine orange, but I didn’t realize we were out)
treat: mangorind candy

This is also a test to see if/how much the lunch degrades by the time I eat it tomorrow.

18 March 2010

Today was nice and sunny outside, and got up to 60F, so I took about an hour long walk while listening to Hobbes’ Leviathan on my iPod.  I have to say, it’s a lot more difficult to comprehend listening to it versus reading it.  Even when I read something like this, I find myself going back and rereading so I can wrap my head around what the author is trying to express.  It’s even more difficult when I’m just listening to it.  I’ve only gotten to the beginning of chapter 4, and listened to each preceding chapter twice in a row.  I’m not really sure what to think of it.  I’ve read excerpts before for class, but I’m not recognizing what I’m listening to so far.  It seems like Hobbes is going on and on about physical things like inertia and heat, and either likening them to, or pinpointing them as causes of, senses, dreams, imagination, etc.  It’s really very dry.  The volunteer reader is very good, though, especially compared to some of the other readers I’ve experienced from Librivox.  It’s also nice that it seems to be the same reader for every chapter so far.  It’s kind of jarring when Librivox has different people read different chapters of a book (though I understand that since all the readers are volunteers and reading an audiobooks is a demanding undertaking, having volunteers only commit to small snippets is logical).

I picked up MC Frontalot’s new album today.  I got to download the mp3s from the site, and my physical CD should arrive sometime in April.  I found out it was coming out because I’ve been reading more blogs lately, including Jhonen Vasquez’s.  I noticed Jhonen did the cover art for the album, and hopped over to MC Frontalot’s page to see when it was coming out.  Since it’s available for order now, I decided to pick it up.