Pi

I finished reading The Life of Pi this weekend. Even though the book wasn't about 3.14, I still found it to be very entertaining.

If you read it, you will find that it shares some themes with the last movie I saw (in a theatre that is), Big Fish. Which reminds me... I need to go see a movie. Who's up for Eternal Sunshine of the blah blah blah.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Riding

One beautiful fall day in New Hampshire I was riding a motorcycle down a quiet back road. The road laid out a path of twists and turns that made for quite an enjoyable ride through the fall foliage. As I entered one of these particularly grand turns in the road I simultaneously encountered another unexpected feature. A sizeable dip (or was it a bump) shifted the weight of my motorcycle upward, and catching me off guard, made my weight lurch backward. The backward motion of my torso, pulled at my arms, which being connected to my wrists and hands caused a similar backward motion of these members. Now as my right hand happened to be firmly gripping the throttle of my motorcycle, the backward force that was applied, caused an acceleration of the whole bike. The acceleration of the bike had two immediate effects. One...the unexpected acceleration only increased the backward tug on my body which in turn increased the acceleration causing the two events to feed into each other. Two...the increased acceleration through the curve caused me to move farther towards the outside of the road and ever closer to the edge. Now I don't mean to imply that I was in some kind of dangerous, life threatening situation. The whole experience happened in a flash, and I was never close to crashing. It was memorable though, as the unexpected acceleration feedback loop pulled me towards the edge of disaster, a brief panic made me want to grip down even tighter. Of course gripping is the one thing that really got this whole mess going and was allowing it to continue. As my heart rate jumped a bit I finally let go of the grip I held on the throttle. I immediately slowed enough to regain all my proper balance and push on through the autumn glory.

Costa Rica 02

You can view a bunch of my Costa Rica pictures at ofoto by going here

The surfing pictures were really hard to take because... 1. We weren't very consistant at catching the better waves and 2. We didn't want to waste our surfing time taking pictures. The ones that I have are mostly on the small waves that we could consistantly stand up on. They're kind of blurry and I had to scan them, so you won't find them in with the ofoto pics.