Keeping my eyes open!

1. Reading the water takes on a while new meaning.

I've been trying to tune myself a bit more to my surroundings, and from time to time it pays off.

Saturday morning, for some insane reason, I decided to go running. As I limped back the last 10 yards to my apartment, briefly imagining the warm beach sun, and the cool seawater on my sweaty skin, I felt some brief relief. I turned up the wavy path to my building, again thinking of my snorkel, and black sand, and for a second glimpsed down at the brook that runs under a section of the concrete walkway. The stream is constantly fed by the rain that falls in the mountains in the middle of the island, and slowly makes its way down towards the valley in which my building sits. Normally it's clear, slow moving, and silent. But this partly cloudy morning, it was mud - reddish-brown, and flowing just a bit faster. Despite the relative tame appearance of the sky, I bet myself a beer later in the day that I should just take a shower, that it would be raining by the time I got clean...

...I'm really starting to like Carib beer. It's clean, crisp, tasty, and light; definitely better than Kubuli. Maybe next week I can get to the beach?


2. Sit too close and you'll go blind...

In lecture the last week, I've adjusted my seating to a more "enlightened" position, and, at the same time, have gained a perspective as to what everyone has on their computers during class. Here's a list as close to the real distribution of what I've seen:

1. The PowerPoint of the current lecture (as to be expected).
2. Nothing. Long live crappy desktop pictures!
3. SOLITAIRE!!!
4. Facebook.
5. Freecell.
6. Google, Yahoo, or other search engines.
7. Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, or other email programs.
8. Myspace.
9. ESPN (in various languages).
10. Chat programs (maybe used in accordance with any of the above).

I have been trying to keep my computer off, or at least asleep, during lecture. Basically, from the list above 90% of computer use is pure distraction. NO GOOD!


If you don't take a second sometimes, to look around at what's going on, you can get trapped, tripped up, or just stuck in the muddy water.