Beautiful panorama from the mountain

Let it snow!

View from the condo in Park City! Woot!

Poached egg (somewhat) success!

Looks like a good way to start the weekend to me!

Reading List - Year in Review

I could have sworn that I did a 1 year wrap-up post with regard to our reading list, but it appears that I am mistaken because I can't seem to find it!  So we decided on the reading list that we use almost 2 years ago (exactly 2 tomorrow) and began this reading adventure. On the spreadsheet (yes, I created a fancy google doc to track our progress) I have a little table to fill in our number of books read each year, but I didn't separate them so the numbers comprise our totals between list and non-list books for the first year. We decided to track everything since we knew this list is probably going to take the better part of a decade to finish, and there is no way we would want to be restricted to just list books for that long! So here was our breakdown from year 1. Me - 7 books, 2009 pages MC - 6 books, 1771 pages While those numbers may not look too impressive, 9 of those months were the ones leading up to our wedding so we had some pretty important distractions :-) I am happy to say that our year-to-date totals are a little better. Me - 22 books (11 from the list), 6905 pages MC - 23 books (10 from the list), 7088 pages As of late, I try my best to alternate between list and non-list books, and the next 4 or so that I have planned will keep with that trend.  I am shooting for reading at least 1 book a month this year, but we will see how it goes considering I also plan on defending my dissertation this year (someone told me you have to, like, prepare a lot for those or something). My other goal is also to tackle one of the monsters on our list.  We have several 1000+ pagers and it would be nice to not save all of them for last. ;-) We'll see how it goes!

Bowlegs 5k

Nice to get back into the groove of the race scene!  We have been running pretty consistently as of late, so I was ready to start running some races again.  Knowing races are coming up are always a good motivator for keeping with the exercise! It went fairly well, though MC had to keep reigning me in because I just kept speeding up for some reason.  As I have a lot of holiday weight I am just in the beginning of getting rid of, so I would have very likely struggled had I been left to my own devices. ;-) Altogether, it was a pretty good first race of 2012! It was also my first run trying out the RunKeeper Android app.  I didn't look through the settings so it turned out she was pretty chatty during the run, but nothing too intrusive.  Below is the snapshot from the site. Always fun to try something new! 32:49 MC - 32:49  

Machine of Death edited by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, and David Malki

Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories about People Who Know How They Will Die by Ryan North My rating: 4 of 5 stars I was turned on to this book by the first editor, Ryan North, as he is also the author of one of my favorite web comics, Dino Comics. It is a collection of submitted stories all based on the premise of a machine being invented that could use a simple blood test to predict exactly how a person would die. It was usually very short and ambiguous (e.g. "old age" could mean you literally die of old age or an old person runs you over with their car). Hundreds of people wrote short stories stemming from this idea. I gave the book 4 stars because, as you can imagine when faced with the writings of over 30 authors, some will align with a certain reader better than others. Some stories I tore through and thoroughly enjoyed, while others were mildly interesting but didn't quite captivate me. Some followed story lines that I could have predicted, and others took the premise in directions I never would have thought about. Altogether, it was a very enjoyable read and very interesting to see so many different takes based on such an intriguing premise. View all my reviews