day 032. [reading]

Note to readers: This blog was inspired by my friend Tarra McCurdy's blog. I suggest that you guys follow her too as she's going through what we call, Post Grad life.

Most of you probably know who Tarra is, but for those that don't I'll tell you who she is, haha. Anyways, Tarra was a senior at the University of Portland and I met her briefly because of Senate. Getting out of it in the Spring because I wanted to focus more on my classes. Anyways, during our time this past spring semester we came up with this idea to write a blog about our adventures in the library. Check it out if you already haven't. As she said in one of her posts, our blog has become something bigger than we thought. It really has! I'm so excited to see where this blog takes us. Even if it doesn't take us anywhere, it's still awesome to know that we have quite a few people following us, whether it's public or purely because we post it up on our Facebook walls!

Alright, enough about that, to the actual portion of this blog. Seeing as I've come home from college, finally, I have a lot of down time. Although this down time could be filled with hanging out with friends, exercising, catching up on sleep, or even my internship/job, I surprisingly would like to use some of my downtime to just read. I've always been one to like reading, but being hampered by text book readings and assigned readings from school (both high school and college) I haven't found the time to really sit down with a good book and read it for all intent purposes.

So with that, I plan on reading a few good books this summer. Some of them might be related to biology/science, but are no way in the form of a text book. On the other hand, some of the books I plan on reading are definitely books that I either had to read in high school or never got around to. If you're wondering, which I hope you are, the books I plan on reading these next two months will be (as listed, not in order):

• Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky - I read this book in high school for AP Lit, but the thing is I had to read it. I didn't really have an option to read it or not. Now is my chance to actually just read it.
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad - This was another book that I could have read, but I chose another book to read instead of it
• The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoevsky - I honestly might not even get around to reading this because I just picked this book up seeing as our public library didn't even have Crime & Punishment. What a crime.
  
• Y: The Descent of Men by Steven Jones - I picked this book up at Powell's down in Portland and it's all about the Y-Chromosome. Me being a biology major and a science person in general, this just caught my eye. Oh yeah! I'm a guy!!
• The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston - In AP Bio my senior year, our teacher made us read The Hot Zone as a final project type sort of thing. At first I thought it was dumb, but I ended up really liking the book. So I figured if I got this book to read it wouldn't be that bad. Oh yeah, I own The Hot Zone.
  

As for what I did today exactly, it started out with an early morning run, another 2 miles. I think my legs are still a bit shot because my time was still somewhat close to what I ran yesterday. After getting off the phone with Tarra we discussed that I should just get my mile time down, which I need to get it down under 6 minutes.

Besides that though, I went to the post office to see how much it would cost to send Tarra's present to her; $2.24 to send it to her, not bad at all. I'll probably send that off tomorrow :)!

Afterwards that's when I drove up to the library to get myself a new library card. You can read all about that here. That was quite the experience being in the library. I enjoy the library much more now after blogging with Tarra!

I then walked down town from the library because I knew we had a little bookshop where you could obviously get books. It was kind of a like a really small Powell's, ha. Even though I checked out Crime & Punishment from another library, I also put an order in to get the book because I kind of like owning good books, even if I've read them before. It's just nice to have them laying around if I ever want to pick the book up.

That was it for today. Sorry this was so long guys, ha.

PS. I know I can only put up one photo a day that I took, but the thing is, the picture of Tarra was for you guys, so you knew what she looked like if you didn't :)

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance. - Confucius