Catching up

So here goes. I feel like I just woke up from a coma, technologically speaking. For the past two years, I haven't had the Internet. In that time, wars have been fought, advances made and whole civilizations formed. It was only within the past couple of months that I heard about Internet revolutions like MySpace, Technorati and Blogger.

Okay, you can laugh.

Instead, I've just been focusing on my little self-contained world in the foothills. Here, I know what's going on. That is my job after all.

Given my immaturity in the Internet world - sleeping for two years will put you behind - you're going to have to give me a break. This blog is a work in progress. I'm sure I'll find my angle as I go.

This post might be a little longer than normal, since I just started it and I have a whole weekend to share.

Every year, my mom and I attend a play by Shakespeare at Sand Harbor at Lake Tahoe. This weekend was it, so after work Friday night I headed up to the Tahoe area, where my mom lives.

I came up Donner Pass just in time to see the sun setting in my rearview mirror, ribbons of pink cloud above and an electric storm in the distance. The backdrop for this was the jagged ridges of the Sierra. The mountains almost looked surreal after living the rolling foothills. I pulled into town just after the storm had passed, and mom and I celebrated her birthday, which is Aug. 1.

Saturday mom and I slept in and then went for a bike/run. This is a tradition we established when I lived with her for a summer during my Internship. She runs; I ride my mountain bike. We do a variety of loops, which all have one or two nearly vertical hills, on a course near her house.

This particular morning, she took me on one that I wasn’t really that familiar with. As I struggled up one of the hills, through rocky and loose dirt tracks that lie between patches of shrubs, I heard the inevitable pat of mom’s running shoes behind me, then beside me, then leaving me in the dust.

I have long since stopped feeling bad when mom passes me on the steep parts of a ride. There are a variety of possible excuses: She weighs less therefore has less weight to haul up the hill; she is acclimated to the elevation; she's superhuman.

The truth is, none of that is really a factor. My mom is just in much better shape than I am. She measures her runs in hours, not miles.

As I zigzagged up the fire road, my heart rate shot to 192. I began to wonder how high it has to get before you die. Still, it was refreshing to be on my bike, and it gave me an excuse to binge on the huge dinner we brought with us to the play later that night.

That is part of the Shakespeare tradition by the way. We all pack coolers full of food and wine, then set up camp in the sand in front of an outdoor stage. We saw Othello, which was one really impressive for a play that you can hardly understand. No really, I loved it. One highlight, though unplanned, was when Othello came running across the stage to greet his wife, and a knife that was tucked in his boot shot out of its sheath and into the front row of the audience.

After a bit of nervous laughter, the actors recovered and the show went on.


Lesson learned: Avoid the front road during Shakespeare tragedies.