Montage

This will hopefully be short. I just finished Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. It was pretty excellent. I’m glad I’m done, because now I can get back to regular life sans story-obsession. I’ll probably bring Hemingway’s short stories to work tomorrow for lunchtime reading – I doubt I’ll get too swept away with that.

Big time copywriting day for me tomorrow (by which I mean today, dear reader). I pulled a website from the queue last Tuesday and haven’t had a chance to do more than the preliminary research for it. Luckily, I’ve managed not to get too many additional knots in my shoulders over this.

The weekend was pretty darned excellent. I hiked Peekamoose and Table mountains, which were numbers 16 and 17 of my 35 winter peaks for the Catskill 3500 Club patch (I have until March 22d to finish the rest). I’m pretty much on schedule: I figure I can get the last 18 mountains climbed in about 10 trips, and I have exactly that many weekends left in which to hike before the deadline. I’m digging the fact that I’m progressing well towards a goal I set back in October.

What I’d really like to do is hike two trips this weekend, to give me some breathing room and so I’m not frantically trying to make up the time if something happens whereby I miss a weekend. Maybe I’ll do Windham on Saturday and Kaaterskill on Sunday. Or Wittenberg and Cornell on Saturday and Windham on Sunday. We’ll see.

YouTube’s in read-only mode right now, so I can’t get the link to my video from this past Saturday to post here. Rats. Maybe tomorrow.

After hiking on Saturday, I went out to dinner with my immediate family for my brother John’s birthday. Definitely a fun experience. After that, I swung down to Jersey City to meet up with my buddy John Barker, who’s been visiting NYC from Britain for the past bunch of days. We’d never met IRL before, so that was cool. I’m looking forward to getting back together with him when he visits again in March.

We met at The Iron Monkey and had the pleasure of witnessing Ugly Purple Sweater and Pearl and the Beard perform. I probably won’t buy/download any of their albums; I’d rather see them live. Pearl and the Beard were particularly entertaining – their energy was incredible. I don’t really have the words to describe it right now, but they’re from Brooklyn, so if you’re around there, check ‘em out. I’m certainly going to go see them again.

Oh, and they were all really nice people, too. Can’t beat that.

So that’s basically it. In my neverending quest to get to work on time, I’m going to head off to my pre-heated bed now. I’ve been meditating quite a bit on loneliness of late. I think I’ve reached the conclusion that something in my nature really wants me to mate – not so much in the hump-hump-hump sense (though that’s certainly part of it), but very much in the base-touching sense. Which is to say, in the sense that a home is different than a house. That’s the best I can describe it right now.

Either that, or I’m slowly going insane and am evolving toward complete sociopathy and antipathy toward my fellow humans. I think I’d rather not do that, but it kind of feels a bit inevitable right now – like gravity.

So yeah, maybe more on that later. And maybe not. I also need to work through another Inventory & Priorities List in the near future. Maybe this week – but not until I’ve spent some hours copywriting.

Ta, all. Sleep well; I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.