Sunday, 29 February 2004

Happy leap day! It occurred to me that I haven't tested the code that links my journals together on a leap day before. It seems to work, though, at least the forward links. I'll have to check tomorrow to make sure the backward links work as well.

I had a thought about writing.

It was prompted by a bit I heard on "Morning Edition" on NPR last week about why people keep making movies from the works of Elmore Leonard and why so many of them are bad movies. They didn't exactly come up with an answer, but one observation was that Elmore Leonard's characters are never passive-aggressive. Their feelings are always out there.

This prompted me to realize that my heros often tend toward passive-aggressive. There's nothing wrong with a passive-aggressive character, but there are a lot of things you can't do with one.

So, an exercise for the near-future: make a short list of personality types that are not passive-aggressive; write a story or two or three with such characters; take advantage of the things they can do that other characters can't.

It's been a great weekend. For one thing, I didn't go into work.

I went for a run on Saturday, 3 miles. I cut it a bit short out of laziness. After having lifted weights in the morning, I just didn't feel like going further than that. Today Jackie and I walked to Panera for lunch, then walked home the long way around, down the Roby trail and then up Duncan and then back along O'Malley's alley.

We've been doing our warmup walks indoors on the treadmill partly because it was cold and partly because I wanted to run--and on the treadmills we can stay together even if I run and Jackie walks. Now that it's nice enough to run outdoors, we did our warmup walk Saturday outside. We saw the first robin of spring! (Today we saw about a dozen more robins, including a group of six together, leading me to suspect that the robins have been back for a while and I just missed them because I wasn't spending enough time outdoors.)