Similar to last week, I blotched a day but still finished well. Last week I must have accidentally bumped some of the elliptical machine’s buttons and reset the readout.

This week, I wasn’t paying attention and the machine shut down after the standard 33 minutes (normally I manually add time for longer workouts).

I still had overall good weekly stats but I can’t stop wondering what could have been.

I ran/ellipticalled 18.4 miles tonight in 103 minutes for 1,010 calories. I’m going to write up my weekly totals soon but tonight’s effort pushed me over 1,000 miles–1,003.6, to be exact.

I’m still probably going to gain weight because I ate nonstop but it would have been worse if I hadn’t got off the couch.

I also completed my 200th Spanish lesson of the year. I still can’t understand Spanish television shows but I think I’m getting better.

I read this Epistle several times before but never posted about it. These are a few passages that stood out to me:

From 2 Timothy 2:23 “Don’t have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels.”

I guess it’s a good thing that I got kicked out of Facebook.

In An Instinct for Dragons, David E. Jones argues that the concept of the dragon evolved from early humans’ predation from leopards, pythons, and large birds of prey. Combining the three predators into one monstrous threat, humans have always known and feared dragons. Not everyone accepts Jones’ theory but belief in dragons has been a part of mankind since ancient times and across all known cultures. It’s not easy trying to come up with a new take on dragon.

Several times I’ve written about Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. To earn my M.A., I was assigned a reading list of 90 books for a three-day test. I was slow making headway but that turned out not to matter–a couple months before the test, I learned they gave me the wrong list.

Today was the 100th time I lifted weights this year and my 350th language lesson. My goal for the year were 400 with weights and 1,000 for language so I’m not as far along as I’d hoped to be but I’m thankful that I haven’t given up.

I saw this guy crawling around inside about 8:30 a.m. I slid a piece of paper under him and dumped him outside. About two hours later I checked where I dropped him off and he was dead and stiff.

I tentatively identified him as a Flat-Backed Millipede but I don’t ķnow what killed him. Pesticide? Ghosts? Assassin Bug?

My good deed was meaningless. I might as well have squashed him.

I’ve wondered if ancient marine reptiles laid eggs on the beach like sea turtles or had live birth like dolphins and whales. After drawing this, I learned apparently they had live birth. These must be an early species that hadn’t adapted to life at sea.

All of the sudden, I remembered an old picture from years ago and it’s the same subject with the same title and, in the body of the post, the realization that plesiosaurs give birth at sea.

I have no originality, I have no memory, and I’m just as dumb as I ever was.

Mom was right afterall!

When I was young, I remember a book with a title along the lines of The Complete Science Fiction Short Stories of H.G. Wells. I’m not sure if I finished all the stories in that book, but I’m fairly certain that I skimmed the beginnings of the ones I didn’t read.

I do not know what year it was that I checked the book out of the library or when it was published, but when I read “In the Avu Observatory,” I realized that (1) I had never seen this story before, and (2) I bet that old book didn’t come close to all of Welľs’ science fiction.