Yosemite National Park
Here's another shot from the Yosemite trip I mentioned yesterday. This one is alsso shot with the zoom lens. I am thinking of buying another lens. A wide angle. For this trip a wide angle would have been so useful. I can't seem to find a good one for less than 1.5K so I guess I'll keep looking. All recommendations are welcome!

Favorite Pasttime
I've decided that my favorite thing to do in my spare time is to read. This is after spending time with my family, of course. Of the things I love doing like writing, taking photos, surfing the net, knitting, etc, reading is by far my favorite thing to do.

There have been tims that I took a break from reading agressively. The most notable being during college. The first two years of college, I didn't read much during the school year. When David was born, I stopped reading for a while. I wasn't getting any sleep and I had a hard enough time juggling him and work that reading was out of the question. A few weeks ago, I randomly started reading again. I am not exactly sure how it happened but it opened some sort of flood gate. I've read 8 books in the last three weeks. I started with the fascinating Opening Skinner's Box and the always wonderful Elizabeth Berg's new Year of Pleasures. I moved on to Freakonomics and Hornby's columns from the Believer and Wisdom of Crowds and Anne Lamott's Plan B and Alice Munro's Runaway. I am now reading Ian McEwan's Saturday and enjoying it immensely, especially considering there's very little happening in the story.

It's almost as if I'd forgotten how amazingly rewarding reading is for me. It's like food for my soul. I don't even know why I feel that way but each time I put a book down, I can't wait to get back to it. My favorite time of the day is the one hour after David goes to sleep where I crawl into bed and read. Okay, my favorite time actually is the mornings when David wakes up because he's so ubelievably happy but right after that is the reading hour.

To add to my joy, some of my favorite authors are coming out with new novels this summer: John Irving, Nick Hornby and Melissa Banks. Thinking about those books makes me giddy!

I don't know what prompted my return to reading, but I am so glad for the distraction. As David's growing old enough to voice his boredom loudly and he's still waking up anywhere from three to seven times a night, it's the books that seem to keep me sane lately.