Hoppy birdy

Today is my birthday, the first one I've spent alone in many years. With Cris still up in Canada, it's been just me and the cats for almost three weeks, and today was no different. I have been spending a lot of time "ripping" music from my CDs onto the Mac using the itunes software which converts the tracks on a CD to .mp3 files. I now have "2.1 days" worth of music, more than 800 separate tracks. The only trouble is, I have no iPod to take with me on my upcoming trip, so all the fooling around with my CDs and iTunes has been rather pointless.

I did get birthday wishes at morning prayer, and a card from Christine and from my mother. I thought of going to a movie, but I stuck around during the afternoon, waiting for UPS to make a second attempt to deliver my replacement credit cards. (I lost my wallet last week.) They didn't. So I thought to myself, "I am sort of piddling away my birthday, without much of an opportunity for thought or contemplation, why not go meditate."

Instead of going to Hartford St., though, I went to the church, hauled out the cushions, and sat in the dimly lit sanctuary. I sat for ten minutes or so, stretched, changed positions, got sleepy, took a short nap, then sat for real for about twenty-five or thirty minutes -- enough to feel like I had almost gotten to center on my breathing. Almost. I didn't come to any big realizations or anything, but at least I felt a little bit slowed down. I've been kind of tense lately for some reason.

It rained on and off all day -- not hard steady rain, just a pelting shower, then nothing, then another shower. Kind of enjoyable, really.

It'll be really nice to get up to the mountains -- somewhere I can listen to the rain without most of the noise being the sound of cars going up a wet street. At Holden there are no cars and no streets! Only a few trucks and a single gravel road. And nowhere to go if you aren't hauling something, so no traffic and no reason for there to be noise. Just the sound of the rain.