Two rock icons from the 60s and 70s have celebrated birthdays yesterday and today (August 20th) First, yesterday rock drummer Ginger Baker celebrated his 78th birthday and today Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin fame celebrates his 69th birthday
So the only things that were rolling through my head this morning as I ran down Long Beach Boulevard on Long Beach Island were thoughts about the Robert Earl Keen song “The Road Goes on Forever”. And that’s what it seemed to do! The second part of that thought was ” I haven’t seen a party yet!” The run was a two-mile straight run from 7th street to 52nd street. At 52nd street, I made a right turn and went slightly uphill to Ocean Boulevard. There I turned and headed north back to my starting point. The total run was four miles. And while it wasn’t that warm out, it was very humid. As a result, I was drenched in sweat when I stopped!! But it was a good run overall!
The Samaritan is book two in the Carter Blake series from Glasgow author Mason Cross. It is also the second of Blake’s adventures that I have read about.And I must say that I found this episode more enjoyable than the first. So I am really looking forward to Winterlong the third book in the series, that has been languishing on my library books to be read shelf for about five weeks!! See I checked it out of the library and then found out it was book three in the series. So I went back and read books one and two before partaking of book three.
Okay, it is now August 6th and I still haven’t recapped the books I finished in July or provided an update on my Reading Challenges.. So, I hope to do just that with this post.. I read five books in July, which brings the total number of books that I have read in 2017 to 33. That leaves me about 2 books off the pace I need to maintain to reach my very high goal of reading 60 books in 2017.
The Killing Season by Mason Cross is the first book in his Carter Blake series. And reading it was my first visit to the world of Carter Blake. He told me in the opening sentences that his name was not Carter Blake. And that he use to be part of a top-secret government operation called Winterlong. But now he hires himself out to find people who don’t want to be found. He’s good at it because he has an uncanny ability to predict his quarry’s next move.In The Killing Season his quarry is a deadly sniper known as “The Chicago Sniper”
So this morning I decided to creat a new course for my run. My training plan since my early 40s has been running four miles on two weekdays.! And then a five to eight mile run on the one of the weekend days. This year I have not run any distance greater than four miles. As a result there are portions of those five to eight mile courses that I have not run this year.
Yesterday morning was almost a perfect morning for a run.It was mostly cloudy and the temperature was in the low 70s. The only drawback was that the relative humidity was slightly high. It was also the mid to low 70s. Because of the cloud cover I really didn’t need to worry about shade.I also knew I wanted to run a fairly flat course. So I ended up basically running a 4 plus mile course around town that I usually run but I ran it in reverse.
I do believe that I say this every time I read a new novel by James Rollins. I don’t know why I put off reading James Rollins books! His latest The Seventh Plague has been sitting on my “to be read” pile of library books for more than a month! Mistake! I finished it last night and it was great!
This morning I was looking over the Jazz Charts at the Roots Music Reports. There were several albums on the chart by artists who I am unfamiliar with that I want to check out. But the album at number two was the one that first caught my attention. It’s title is Serenade for Horace by jazz drummer Louis Hayes. Now two things combine here to make this album interesting to me. First, I know little about Louis Hayes. Now I’ve become familiar with Horace Silver’s music over the last few years. The reason is that many times when I listened to jazz on the radio, a song would come on that caught my attention. So I’d look to see who it was and many times it was Horace Silver!! Anyway when I saw the name Horace Silver I knew I would probably like the album. Guess what, I was right!!
