3/7: After 18 years of almost complete silence, my ex-wife Linda re-established communications when she sent me a friendship request via Facebook.

3/7: Spent a 60-degree spring day sitting inside with my eyes closed during an excellent CIMC workshop on Wise Speech. Then celebrated Dylan's birthday with the CIMC crew by having dinner at the Elephant Walk and Corrugated Fun at Lizzie's Ice Cream (after having already ingested a pint of Haagen Dazs for lunch)!

3/6: What could be better than Futurists and typography combined? Read Alan Bartram's Futurist Typography and the Liberated Text. Sadly, their stuff looks awfully dated to a modern designer's eye.

3/2: Gleaned a bunch of notes and ideas from the travel tome Victoria: The Unknown City in preparation for a planned trip to Vancouver Island to visit my brother sometime soon.

2/25: Read Dave Shea's The Zen of CSS Design, the book based around his influential and eye-opening site CSS Zen Garden.

2/22: Visited the Boston Globe Travel Show and came away with a truckload of flyers. The ratio of material wound up being 28% Thailand, 22% Caribbean, 20% New England, and 30% miscellaneous.

2/21: Local metal bike manufacturer Independent Fabrications put several of their most noteworthy creations on display at ad hoc art gallery Fourth Wall Project.

2/13: I didn't have to take any vacation days to enjoy a short trip to Pittsburgh to visit my friend Inna. Highlights included meeting two new cats (Pumpy and Prawn), a walking photo expedition around downtown, and culinary visits to Indian Garden, Mad Mex, Pamela's, Green Mango, Klavon's Ice Cream, Oh Yeah!, and Mario's South Side Saloon.

2/9: Although I sadly missed a talk by Stephen Squyres, principal scientist for the Mars rovers, I did get to see the slightly dated IMAX movie Roving Mars at the Museum of Science.

1/29: More than a year after the Mayor Menino kicked off Boston Bikes first Bike Summit, I attended an impressive annual review presentation by Nicole Freedman at the BPL. The most interesting development for me is the anticipated striping of Dartmouth Street.

1/23: Read David Allen's organizational book "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity". It'll probably provide some incremental improvements to my existing process. Unfortunately, he took 14 chapters to reiterate the information contained in his first three, but then the book would be small enough that the Penguin couldn't charge fifteen bucks for it. Good thing I could snag it from the BPL!

1/20: Two most wonderful and monumental events took place: Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated President of the United States, and George W. Bush finally went back to the ranch.

1/16: Completed "The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality", the Dalai Lama's analysis of the commonalities between Buddhism and science's learnings and approaches to understanding the mind and consciousness.

1/14: The advantage of being the only person to attend an afternoon talk entitled "Getting Through a Volatile Market" is that you can easily snag a couple hours' worth of free financial advice from a financial planner dude. Very nice!

1/9: Despite being written by Bill Strickland, former editor of Bicycling Magazine, and being shelved in the cycling section of the library, his "Ten Points" isn't about cycling at all, but a disturbing tale about domestic abuse. Not a fun read in the least, but an interesting work from someone whose name I became familiar with from his job at Rodale. And FYI, his blog is here.

1/6: An overnight fire started by a short circuit rips through a commercial block in the West Fens, destroying six popular restaurants and a dry cleaner. A mere block from where I used to live, I frequently hung out at Thornton's Fenway Grill for brunch or dinner throughout the 90s.

1/4: Read Graeme Fife's amply-titled "The Beautiful Machine: A Life in Cycling, from Tour de France to Cinder Hill". Like his Tour de France book, this was rambling, self-indulgent, off-topic, and lacking in cohesivenes, but I did enjoy the chapters he spent describing rides along many of my favorite Massachusetts routes.