Day Seven: Reading by listening

This officially is my first full week of layoff. I spent six and one half hours driving over 390 miles from Pasadena to Pacifica and I most likely wouldn't have done this trip, or been able to have done it this way without having been laid off. I'm truly enjoying this different Life after Layoff.

I was looking forward to the long drive to do some deep thinking but instead, I listened to part 2 of How the brain works and Ian Flemings' 1953 book "Casino Royale." (I don't have parts one, three and greater, which is a long worded way of saying I only have part two.) It was short but quite informative. In it, I learned that we don't really learn anything without adequate rest. In fact, sleep deprivation can be a killer. I also learned that there are declarative, procedural, perceptive, and emotional learning / memory and that dreams are the association of those four for storage and eventual retrieval.

Casino Royale was both amazingly like and substantially different than the movies of the same name. The movies stayed very close to the intent of the book, with some updating and perhaps making the Bond character more, well, likable.

Perhaps more amazing was that I made it most of the way without having to back off of cruise control. I was only trapped once on I-5 and once on 152, before I had to drop off of it all together at the construction on 152. Then is was on and of several times up 101 and I-280. My Prius calculated mileage was 52 mpg.

While I was in awe of the gold and black hills and loved looking at them whenever I could do so safely, my lasting memory is of the acres and acres of bare ground of a cattle feed lot. This lot had thousands of cows, mostly under strips of tin roofs held up by metal poles, separated by more land. Every once in a while there was a sprinkler going off to keep the cattle cool.

Now that I've caught up on my Life after Layoff blog, I will definitely be going to bed earlier tonight than I have in the previous three nights. However, my to do list is growing. I'm getting excited about some of the things coming up and while a lot of work, it will be fun work. While work may be a four-letter word, fun definitely is.