pagesofjulia

Sunday Salon: February 5, 2012

How’s everybody doing this weekend? Houston is having a recurrence of an old event we used to see around here back in the day. It’s been raining! I did some internet research the other day and learned that our annual rainfall is right around 50 inches; in 2011, Houston’s driest year on record, we had about 20 inches, of which we had seen only 12 by mid-October. It was those 8 inches in the last 10 weeks of the year that managed to bring us up to the still shockingly (record-breaking-ly) low number of 20. So far in 2012 we are close to 10 inches, which has come in a handful of one-day downpours. All of this is to say… 1) rain is very exciting for us these days; 2) Houstonians seem to have forgotten how to drive in the rain; 3) this is wonderful for our poor parched earth (gardens, farms/ranches, mountain bike trails, trees – of which we’re losing some 70 MILLION – you read that right – due to last year’s drought) but also 4) it’s wrecking my weekend. You see, I’ve been working on recovering from my knee surgery (in December) and hoping to make my comeback to mountain bike racing at the end of this month, and my training time is so precious to me… especially since we’ll be in Nashville next weekend to see our favorite band play two nights in a row! (Very exciting! Look for a Walk About Town post to follow that trip, hopefully.) So losing both days of intended mountain biking this weekend to rain is really bumming me out. I’m trying to stay positive and think of how much the whole city needs this rain, and be happy with yoga, the gym, and my shortened road ride yesterday.

Weather aside, what’s going on? Well, I’m getting some reading done this weekend. (That’s the upside to all the rain.) I feel like I’ve spent all my reading time lately on books for review for Shelf Awareness, and none on pleasure reading; and all my audiobook listening time for weeks now has gone to Anna Karenina, which is a huge time commitment. So it was nice to pick up a few quick reads this weekend: Hemingway’s On Paris, for one – always nice to return to an old favorite – and then Edward Abbey’s The Journey Home. Abbey is an old favorite, too, and this is a gem; I’ve had such fun with it, including reading one short piece out loud to Husband and laughing out loud at it together. Good times. Reviews to come on both of these.

The weekend digest is rather boring, I guess: it rained, I didn’t get to ride like I wanted to, but I read some good short books. In the coming week I’ll be simultaneously prepping for our trip to Nashville and my upcoming race that I don’t feel prepared for! What are you up to this weekend? And what are you reading?

Filed under: sunday salon | Tagged: personal |