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Happy Birthday!

Rokko Island Running Track (50 metres from Sean's school, (snow dusted) Rokko Mountain in the distance). Most Sundays, like yesterday, I am standing on this spot around 10:15, on the starting line of a 5.1 km (3 mile) run. My times are improving at the moment, which is some compensation for the effort.)

Click to play*

Today being my mother's birthday, the very least I can do is to breath some sign of life into this dormant blog. Of course, it's not the least I could do—and really, I know it's very far from adequate, but it's perhaps the best I can do, faute de mieux. For a variety of reasons, some of which I'll briefly enumerate, and some of which are good—whether these are the same set of reasons, you can judge better than me—I find it increasingly difficult to compose a decent article. I know I can do it—or rather, I have been able to in the recent past—but when push comes to shove, it's that much easier to retreat into one of the following excuses.

  1. I need my sleep. Or so I'm told. Sometime last year, the BBC and other online broadcasters got very excercised (or alarmist, or both) about the mental and physiological benefits of achieving more than 7-8 hours' sleep a night; conversely, about the perils of sleep deficit. The (sometimes explicit) message of many of these articles is that to sleep less than 7 hours per night is court all manner of in-sanity, from hypertension to cancer to strokes, to Alzheimers, to hasten death, and guarantee a lowered quality of life in the years (months?!) beforehand. These articles have convinced me—as much by their profusion, and clear appeal to my hypochondria as by any winning arguments—that I should take said advice to heart, and go to bed earlier. Since I have to get the kids up and out before 7:15 each weekday morning, there's no possibility of a lie-in. (Anyway, that's not the beneficial end of the night, we are told). Early to bed, early to rise..The only problem with this old saw is that almost all of my blog-writing—including this piece—has been done after 11pm. In fact, just writing this paragraph has brought me to within 20 minutes of 6.5 hours sleep: if I were to write all I intended to tonight, I'd face an appalling and medically indefensible sleep-deficit charge. And so, I'll write the second installment tomorrow..but publish this (as incomplete as it may be), just to let you know I am thinking of you.
Justin and Julian at Oji Zoo yesterday
 *[Unusually, the song has no hidden message: just something I came across recently and liked]

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