Thursday April 24, 2008 5:00 am Lethbridge Alberta

This page last updated on: Friday, April 25, 2008 4:25 PM

It is -6 C with a high forecast of +3 C. Sunrise 6:21 Sunset 20:38 Hours of daylight: 14:17

A. Morning Musings

It is always good to be home. But it is still winter! I was really surprised. I had assumed that all of the snow would have melted by now. The temperature has failed to be above zero for almost a week. Yesterday's high was -2 C. The entire province is under a solid blanket of snow. The forecast indicates that today and tomorrow will remain cool and then there will be return to more seasonable temperatures.

I am pleased to be awake at 5 am after a solid 8 hours of sleep. Hopefully I will not have too much difficulty adjusting to the time zone but I am cognizant of the fact that this usually takes me a week or so before I am back in the regular rhythm. We shall see.

First things first. Now to get a cup of coffee on the boil.

Mmm. That first sip is always good.

Now to keep my pace at a slow level. Savor the coffee. Done. Savor the Rumi readings. Done. Now what. Another sip.

Priorities. First is diet, exercise and walking. This will also involve resuming a strict monitoring of what I eat using my FitDay software within my Windows environoment.

Ouch. This was a painful reminder that I need to get control of my eating and exercise. In order to get my weight back to an ideal level I need to lose 23 pounds. I will need to approach this cautiously - nothing dramatic but slow and steady. I have now set up the FitDay parameters. Now to give a few minutes thought to exercise and walking. Walking is easy. I am in fairly good shape for this. I want to begin with an hour walk and alternate level and coulee paths. With the current situation of snow on the ground, I will stay on a level path for the next few days until the paths in the coulee dry out. That leaves exercise. This has always been my achilles heel. I have found a set of 7 exercises that should be carried out for 20 minutes/day on alternate days.

Learning Category	Planned Activities for Today	Time
Literature	Begin morning with a Rumi reading
Literature	Make notes for "Wolf Totem" by Jiang Rong	1 hr
Technology	Update these web pages to include images and link to Notes Index	2 hr
Psychology	Begin reading "Proust was a Neuroscientist" by Jonah Lehrer	1 hr

B. Actual Learning Activities

6:00 am

Exercise. I will begin with 1 set of the 7 exercises with each exercise having 8 repetitions and will work up to 3 sets of 15 repetitions. The first goal is to become familiar with the routine. Done. I am surprised at how difficult this was. These were easy exercises but I could already feel the pull on my muscles and I have worked up a slight sweat. I must remind myself to begin slowly until my muscles begin to get used to this. Still, I am pleased that I have actually begun this. I will make this an early morning routine. That still leaves walking. Given the early morning temperatures, I will wait until noon or early afternoon for this.

8:00 am

I have finished updating my web pages for the last 3 weeks to include scans of the book covers that I was reading. Now to make a few notes for the novel I read on the plane trip back to Canada.

Wolf Totem

Jiang Rong

I bought this book while in Brisbane. It was a good book to have for the long plane trip back to Canada.

This book won the Man Asian Literature Prize in 2007 and has just been translated into English.

The story has a strong autobiographical flavor to it as it describes life on the Mongolian grasslands in the period of the Cultural Revolution as seen through the eyes of a Han Chinese student who moves to Monglolia to help with the rural sheep herding. He quickly becomes enamored with the lives of the grassland wolves and learns to see the inter-relationships among all of the various natural factors that make up this ecosystem. There is a strong graphic portrayal of the contrast between a culture that has existed in this area for thousands of years and the attempts to modernize the area with the resulting destruction of both a culture as well as the land itself.

The book is a modern day Silent Spring and is unusual for it's negative portrayal of this part of Chinese history. The book is a fascinating description of the efforts of the main character to raise a wolf cub and is superb at showing the relationships among wolves, people, sheep, cattle, horses, marmots, mice as well as weather and soil.

The actual writing is fairly basic but the story and ecological lessons are excellent. I would rate it as 4.5 out of 5.

Tags: novel, China, ecology, wolf

Now to select my next book. Since I have just finished reading the Proust series "In Search of Lost Time" I would like to read "Proust was a Neuroscientist" which looks at how a number of famous authors have looked at human nature. I just realized that the image on the cover is a madeleine.

9:00 PM

A good beginning. I made a very good pot of vegetable soup and used the new pottery soup bowls. The soup is both nutritious and low on calories. I did some early morning exercises and can feel it this evening. I did not go walking as it was still a little too cool to enjoy the walk. Hopefully tomorrow. Exercise, low calories and walking are a good combination. Today was 2 out of 3. I will aim for 3 out of 3 tomorrow. I must take this seriously.

The first chapter of "Proust was a Neuroscientist" is about Walt Whitman. It is a very good first chapter as it describes and explains Whitman's approach to poetry. I also learned about the significance of the title to his book of poems, "Leaves of Grass". Leaves is a publishing term for pages and grass is a term for "of little value". There are no metaphores here.

There are five chapters, out of eight, in the book that I am especially interested in: those about Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne and Virginia Woolf.

Books on the Go Today

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