his dark materials

My next-door colleague Gary Alan Fine has a restaurant blog, running for more than a couple years now. How did I not know this?

Also, in the annals of "Oops, I Did It Again," I hypothesized that I would have better motivation to perseverate while exercising if I listened to an audiobook rather than music. So I bought The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1) on iTunes. I did listen to it while I exercised, then I also spent 9 more hours over the last two days not exercising but listening to it all the way to the end. (Very highly recommended, btw, at least in audiobook form.) Says a friend, "You should just decide you are only going to listen to it while you are exercising." Yeah, right. Those stories about women suddenly having the strength to lift cars off of their children are more plausible than the idea of me suddenly having a burst of will-muscle that would allow me to do that once I am into a story.

Still not as bad as when I sat around listening straight through to the final 12 hours of the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix audiobook, my least favorite of the HP series anyway.