Ouch!

I took the day off of work today and went cross country skiing with my sister Marci. It was my first time ever on a pair of a skis. I was actually fairly proud of myself that I only managed to fall on my ass 3 or 4 times. It wasn't necessarily pretty when I wasn't falling on my ass, but at least I was upright. I may actually go again sometime if I can manage to recover from my sore muscles... muscles that I didn't even know that I had before today.

Bottomless Friends

It just occurred to me what I really appreciated about my friends Chris and Shannon. They were bottomless friends. They were always up for doing something fun. It didn't matter if we had just done something the night before. It didn't matter if we had done something together every night for the last week.

Nowadays, I still have some good friends, but they are the kind where I have to pay for refills. Of course, not literally. But it feels like I wear out my welcome a lot quicker with my new friends. They are all married, or engaged; some of them have kids. They only have so much time that they are willing to spend with a bum like me.

A Year of Reading

I thought that now would be a good time to reflect on the books that I read in 2004. In the past I've kept a list on my website, but I've been too lazy to update it manually. It is so much easier to just blog it. So here goes, starting with the most recent completion and working backwards:

Selected Dialogues of Plato translated by Benjamin Jowett and revised by Hayden Peliccia
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
Poor Folk and Other Stories by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre
Either/Or by Soren Kierkegaard