Boulder

Mary and I are out in Boulder, CO on the first trip we've taken without the kids for many years, staying at Leslie and Walter's new house. It is pretty darned nice here. A little less than a mile from their house is a trailhead which opens onto a pretty major system with miles of trails going up into the hills. Not too shabby.

It does feel, if anything even more coddled and sheltered from reality than even Chapel Hill. Certainly it's a good deal whiter.

But it is our vacation so I'm not going to complain, am just noting. I am also making some progress reading through a novel (Patricia Highsmith's 1986 Found in the Street, which I happened across at a used bookstore recently, pretty sure it was the one in New Haven where the convenience store was when I was in college -- a great improvement, although the cheap hot dogs at about 1 in the morning hit the spot back in the day). It is good to get traction in a book, for sure, however light, after flailing against a number of weighty ones recently. There is something -- and I think I may have blogged about this recently, about just reading a lot, just letting the ideas pass through like krill through the baleen of my mind. It doesn't matter what they are, so long as they flow.