In May, my friend Richard and I agreed to go hiking for a week. I initially suggested the first week of July, but later pushed it back to the first week of August. By that time I’d be guaranteed to have finished my project. Guar-an-teed. I rolled right through the beginning of July still going to bed at dawn and working 18 hours a day, but, alas, my to-do list was shrinking.

On this particular evening I can’t seem to verbalize a single coherent thought. I hunt for the words to express what I want to tell him… but they don’t come. I just end up with a series of sentence fragments which I realize after about eight or ten words don’t really make any sense.

There was a time when I feared my life would become a boring series of redundancies. Granted, it’s been a long time since I felt that way, but this year has strayed so far away from “boring” or “redundant” that I find myself pining for some good old-fashioned routine.