The Exercise Thing Continues

This morning was a tough one: with the outside temperature hovering in the uppers 20s would I be able to get out of bed before dawn for a hour long walk? Yes and no. I slept poorly last night. At times I would wake up, sweating profusely*, other times I would simply toss and turn to the point I was keeping everyone else awake. Eventually I sought the sandman in the other bedroom grumbling about "the mattress being too soft" as I made my exit.

(*my beloved little German Shepherd, Beeper, can roast anyone out of bed. Should science discover the source of her radiant heat I am quite sure a Nobel Prize in some kind of scientific field would follow along shortly thereafter. It's rare that she sleeps up against anyone; her normal place in the bed, if she is even in the bed, is balled up near the bottom (given her mostly white and tan coloring, with a sprinkling of black, and her seemingly unnatural ability to squeeze into an impossibly small ball, she takes on the appearance of a slightly toasted cinnamon bun while sleeping, and a hot one at that)).

But rise before dawn I did and I manged to get in a 45 minute walk, not the 60 minutes I wanted, but close enough. It was cold, yes, but the quiet and stillness of a cold morning was a welcome change.

Today at lunch I'll make up the difference in my workout by either walking to the old Durham Athletic Park and back, with a stop at The Book Exchange of course, sauntering up the American Tobacco Trail in the other direction or I'll head down to the YMCA for 30 or 45 minutes on the elliptical torture device followed by some weights.

As for my reading Kelly and I both started reading The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. Yes, I am still reading A Movable Feast by Hemingway. In general I don't like to read two books at the same time; I prefer to give my full attention to one and move on from there. However Kelly wanted to read this book with me but there is a problem: I read at a faster pace than Kelly. So we agreed we would both read a bit each night and when I got to some kind of natural break point I would put down The Glass Castle and pick up something else thus giving Kelly time to catch up before lights out. So far, after one night, the plan seems to be working.

So what is The Glass Castle all about? As I have pointed out previous the book is a memoir about a girl growing up with alcoholic parents, at least that was my understanding before opening the book. Turns out the Walls children are going to have to put up with hardships beyond parental alcoholism. "Such as" you may ask? How about a mother that seems to take no interest in raising her children; Jeannette's first memory, from when she was three, was lighting herself on fire via the kitchen stove while cooking herself a hotdog. The Walls family was big on self-reliance. But therein lies a problem: while a child of three might remember a traumatic event, even vividly, I doubt any child of three posses recall at the depth Walls claims she did.

That said this may be a simple case of a third-party story becoming a first-party memory. If your mother told you the same story of an event from your childhood I could conceive that, over the years, that same story could be internalized and associated with the very real traumatic event that links the two together. That said I am not a child psychologist, or someone who has been degreed in Earl Childhood Development (or a parent for that matter) so take all that with a grain of salt. Still Walls' writing is solid and easily digestible. Her story, so far, is well told and easy to follow and her writing is descriptive enough for one to make their own mental pictures (not all writers are able write like this, so my hat goes off to her for her efforts; they are appreciated).