Had another great run this afternoon. It was my 6th day is a row and my 10th in 11 days. I'm trying real hard to get up to the 1000 mile mark for 2009. After today's run I have 1 miles to go. Should be easy enough to do. We'll see. I'm running shorter and slower than I have been, partly because of the cold and poor footing and partly because I am simply enjoying the running for its own sake. and that has been the great reward! My runs have been so much more fun simply because I was enjoying them with no pressure attached.

We'll see how things go into the new year, but I have already decided that there will be no marathons on my calender this year, but hopefully a lot of shorter races, 5k's, 10k's, 15k's and a couple of half-marathons. That would be fun without the intensity of marathon training. My marathons of late have not been the best; no that is not true, they have in reality been awful. Having a good time running is big right now.

change tack, I'm glad to see the Obama health care package is slowly passing its way through congress. I'm very disappointed in it in many ways but it is still a huge step in the right direction and it can certianly be improved on over the years. It is still a far cry from the single-tier, single-payer system we have here in Saskatchewan but it is progress. I listen to the hue-and-cry from both the right and the left, and though my own leaning are very much on the left, I find that both sides seem to have a total lack of understanding that politics is the art of the possible, that no legislation is ever perfect and that there is(or should be) plenty of room for honest disagreement amongst citizens. The increasing polarization of the US in the last couple of decades seems to have destroyed this understanding, to the point that it is reported that pastors in their pulpits are praying for President Obama's death. This is so un-Christian that I fail to understand why their parishoners haven't given them the heave-ho, though my guess is that their parishoners have also never heard the Gospel as I hear it every week and as I read it in Scripture.

My own take on all of this is that the problem is a compound of the polarization, racism, Chicago School Economics, fear mongering, the growth of rampant individualism over any sense of community, and a sense for a lot of people that the world is changing too rapidly for them to get a grip on. I am afraid that it will end in the impoverishment and disintegration of the United States before I die of old age, and cause serious problems here in Canada where we seem to spend too much time trying to imitate the worst of America in order to shore up our inferiority complex.