It’s a beautiful moonlit night. A few twinkling stars. Venus has risen in the western sky and its 72F at 10 pm. It doesn’t get much better in Western New York than that. I’m enjoying it. Tomorrow the mercury is supposed to reach into the mid-nineties. This morning was a beautiful sunrise as I got in five miles on the running track. I’ve been running outside for over a month now. I’m enjoying the fresh smells and the sound of geese and other birds flying overhead and the feel of the slight chill of the breeze on my face as I run. Today I was trying to run more mindfully, trying to stay in the moment, on this step and not think about a hundred steps ahead. I tried to think of each step, each pace on the running surface. I could feel the grain of the surface and the slight resilience of the track. My mind wanders, I think of the day ahead and what I’ll do. I catch myself and I come back to the sound and feel of each step, I close my eyes and try to be one with the run. There is a oneness in this running.
I spend the morning mindfully duplicating the graduation DVD that I made over the weekend. I made nearly thirty copies of graduation today. In the videotape days it would have taken nearly five days to produce thirty copies of a 90 minute ceremony, but with digital video, production softwares and DVD writers it’s possible to make one copy every nine or ten minutes and the quality is much better. I also spent much of today setting up the school’s new MythTV box. It’s a CoreDuo CPU with 2 gigs of RAM, a Happaugue PVR-250, nVidia PCI-Express a pair of 250 gigabyte Western Digital drives and Ubuntu 7.04.
I got MythTV downloaded, installed and partially configured. I actually recorded some video today, then I goofed things up a bit. I’ll do it again tomorrow. I’m thinking of “blowing it all away” and starting afresh. It’s summer and same halls that were full of noise and children are empty and quiet. There was a stillness today that was reminiscent of a day at the monastery.