Lane's Ramblings

We're going to try blogging again. How do you feel about that?

My problem is that I don't find my life very exciting. I live in the suburbs, I don't have a job, and I pretty much sit around and read, train for an upcoming marathon, and take care of the dogs. I suppose it's more complicated than that but that's how I explain it to people, why I don't call anyone, and why I don't really email anymore. Not to mention but in the employed world everything's fast paced; you have 30 seconds to push out a 3 paragraph email to a friend 10 time zones away. But here, sitting at home, where's the rush? 10 days later you get the "are you still alive?" follow up.

But (as many times before) I feel something coming out. An explosion of want and need to express myself through words. Ok, fine, it's more of a leaking than an explosion but let's get through this anyway.

At the moment I'm drinking scotch (pretty good), going through Nick Hornby's "The Polysyllabic Spree" (read it earlier this year) to see if I should read any of the books that he mentioned, and scrolling through Business Week's 'World's Most Expensive Cities 2009' (so far not shocking or exciting).

I've been doing a lot of sudoku lately (on lovatts.com.au because I like the set up) to try to sharpen my brain a little bit. I'm doing other stuff too, I'm just talking about this at the moment. I've also tried their crosswords but I'm not a big fan - they have too many answers that are plural nouns. Mostly I do the level 2 puzzles but occasionally I do level 1 if I don't have much time (I'm about to start a level 3) and usually finish in under 30 minutes (today was less than 15). When I did one on the train the other day (in the free paper) it was noticeably more difficult even though it was marked as 'novice'. (side note - No 17 on the 'most expensive list is Manhattan; does that count as its own city? Also, I'm surprised at the number of African cities on the list.) In the end I had two 3s in the same block and gave up.

This morning while I was reading ("High Fidelity" by Nick Hornby) I remembered that I had recorded a soccer match from the night before (Confederation Cup - it's being played in South Africa so comes on around 3am here). But Ula's mother was here and I didn't really want to seem as if I sat around reading fiction and watching soccer so I didn't turn it on. A few chapters later I went to the computer to check the news sites and it's plastered everywhere, "The US upsets Spain!" Damn. That's the game I recorded and the US, who was very flat in the first two games and somehow squeaked into the semi-finals (I still don't understand how) when the beat Egypt, just upset the number 1 ranked team in the world who happened to be playing with a 35 game unbeaten streak. Aside - I am not a US national team fan, nor am I jumping on the bandwagon, it's just a coincidence that I was born and raised in the country that the team that I am happy for is representing. I would be just as happy if it were Senegal or India (probably more so). They played well in that game and so did Spain and they had a lot of chances. If they beat Brazil in the final then I'll be happy again. But I'm still picking a different team to back for the World Cup next year.

Tomorrow I'm going to Ula's father's farm to give the dogs a bit of a run around and hopefully see some baby cows - they have 3 cows, 2 are pregnant and due any day. I was there last week and nothing.

This writing took about 10 minutes while being distracted so maybe I can do this regularly.

BTW - finished level 3 sudoku in 17:46. I have to go feed the dogs.