Met a police car on my run today...on the cross country course! Looking for pot smokers, no doubt. My beloved course - overrun by druggies!

I've been reading novels lately. Reading is truly great, it's life in print. A person can experience a lot by just reading. Like in Anton Chekhov's short story The Bet, a guy agrees to voluntarily imprison himself for fifteen years for a sum of money. After fifteen years of thinking, reading, and writing, but never leaving his confinement, he no longer desires the money because his life expereience has been so enriched in the interim.

The mark of a truly great novel is when you think about the characters not as characters in a book, but as real people that you have come to know. They influence your life. You have conversations with them, you find yourself asking, "What would ______ do, say in this situation?" The best execution of this I have encountered so far is Tolstoy's Konstantin Levin.