I had a plan. I was going to start getting up early and going to the gym again. And just in case there's no time stamp on this post, just let me tell you that it is in fact 5:30 in the morning on the dot. I got up at 4:30 on the dot. It also started thunderstorming (again) at about 4:23 on the dot. I know because it was quite loud, and R checked his phone for the time while I curled up into a ball like a frightened puppy, which I tend to do during thunderstorms.

"I'm taking you to work," I informed him after the rain began to pelt the windows with great zeal.

So I got up and made pancakes and scrambled eggs and coffee. I'm just that great.

But back to my plan. I was all dressed down in old frisbee clothes with a water bottle in my tote bag when I took R to work yesterday (more rain). I pulled into the gym's parking lot at 5:48. There wasn't an attendant in the little pay-as-you-leave booth, but I imagined that they probably didn't have to be clocked in until 6. The gym, as it turned out, was not open yet, either. I figured I could drive home and hop on my bike to avoid having to pay for parking, so off I went... only to discover, upon arriving home and checking the hours online for the rec center, that it did not in fact open until 8am. I had to wait for two hours--and in that two hours I finished Nicholson Baker's 2003 novel A Box of Matches, which was a super-quick though only vaguely interesting read.

(I cannot decide if I am a huge fan of Nicholson Baker or if I am going to boycott any reading of his other novels. He focuses minutely on the absolute ordinary--which I love. I am both intellectually and just plain humanly interested in depictions of the ordinary. But there's just something about his writing--I can't put my finger on it, unless it's his demonstrated need to always have a page or three describing in detail the bathroom "rules" of "all men", which I find a little too easy, like he's going for the obvious joke, and also too generalizing for a writer of his possible power. But the 178-paged book is from the point of view of a man who has started getting up between 4-6 in the morning each day before his household awakens and who sits in the dark slowly burning a pile of wood and scrap paper with a new match. The book ends when he finishes the box of matches. What the book is really 'about' are his thoughts during those morning sessions, which has a lot of potential. His family has a pet duck and that was probably my favorite thing in the whole novel. )

But-the gym. I feel sometimes as though I need more of a routine. Class each morning for an hour and twenty minutes, then six hours of work on Tuesdays and Thursdays, is just not enough somehow. I know I promise myself this every few months or so and almost nothing ever comes of it, but I want to add the gym back into my life. And blogging. So at some point I'll devise some kind of a plan for those things. At the moment I need to think about my Adrienne Rich paper and put that on some kind of an organized timeline so that it gets done before R and I fly out to Boston.

And, you know, pack. I move in exactly a week!