Sunday, April 25, 2010

Closing Thoughts For The Week

Another Sunday is winding down and the spectre of another Monday begins to come forward. It has been a nice few days away from the worries and cares of work, though the circumstances could have been better for Merilee. She is finally starting to feel better and that is definitely a good thing. We would much rather have been camping, but hindsight shows that things worked out for the best. There will be other weekends.

Tomorrow I get to find out if a certain unnamed cable company has finally managed to fix a problem that has plagued me for almost a month now. It seems that line noise has been making it virtually impossible for me to use my phone for work. Each new day has been a bit of an adventure wondering if people are going to tell me I am breaking up or not. I have enjoyed not having to deal with that. I just hope that they were finally able to solve the problem while I have been off.

Yesterday I decided to take a bit of a bike ride to enjoy the beautiful weather and feel the sun. I originally planned on heading toward Utah Lake on the river trail, turning around when I felt that I had gone far enough. I did not want to over do things like I usually do, but the further I went, the better I felt. I kept going almost to the end of the trail that runs along the fence at Utah Lake State Park. I felt a little tired, but not unpleasantly so. It was the return trip that did me in. I tend to forget, when riding to the lake, that the trail trends downward, so riding back is more of an uphill ride. I started to feel cramping in my back and my legs were complaining, but I did the whole trip in about 90 minutes and I felt pretty good when it was done. I'm sure Merilee and I will be making that trip quite often this summer.

Last night I also finished Anathem by Neal Stephenson. I did something I have not done in quite a long time; I ready 140 pages at one sitting. It was a very interesting book, combining science fiction, math, and philosophy in very intriguing ways. He manages to create a culture that is similar enough to ours that it is familiar, but different enough that is was very interesting. I have read four other novels by Stephenson, including the three-volume Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and System of the World), and there is something about the way he writes that I quite enjoy. These are not novels you just breeze through in an afternoon; you have to pay attention and they make you think, all while being very entertaining.

I have been trying to force myself to sit down and start writing again, as in creative writing. It is one of my goals for this year that has never really gotten off of the ground. For some reason, I just never seem to manage it. It's not that I do not have ideas; it's just that taking the time to commit them to something other than my own grey matter has proven quite the challenge. I think a lot of it has to do with my own internal misgivings and a marked lack of confidence. I am not sure why this has been the case lately, but I have just not felt overly confident about myself. Self-doubt is present more often than not, and the 'why bother' part of me tends to win out. I am hoping that I can channel Saturday's success to other areas and actually get things going.

That's about all for now. I have decided that I am going to try to use this blog to focus more on the positive things than the negative. Not every entry will be upbeat because life just isn't that way (especially my life recently) and I want this blog to be realistic, but when I have something less positive to say, I am going to try to bring something good into the entry as well. Think of it as me trying to force myself to improve my outlook and not focus on the negative. We'll see how that goes. Maybe I'll start a blog where I can be as negative as I want and no one has to see it but me. Maybe I just need a therapist; who knows. Anyway, this is starting to sound like babbling to me, so I think I will go for now.

No comments: