Update on my Swimming

Wh-hay! The blog is working now, so I can write. I have various photos (but not on this computer yet), so eventually I will make the blog a little more pleasant to the eye.
The last week has been a special one for me, since I have swum about 9 miles in the last seven days (Monday the pool is closed, so I am forced to rest that day). I did two miles today. I am swimming more relaxed and consistently and breathing easily. As I am getting more consistent and a little stronger, I am getting more feel for the water (and hand paddles near the end of the workouts are particularly good for this). Maybe one day I will purchase Karlyn's instructional DVD. While I am not overly concerned with how fast I am going, I did start off today (as I warmed up) with a 400m in 7m 12s. So there is a slight improvement, and generally I still felt fairly fresh around the 3,000m mark and even beyond that.
I also do not feel so tired the rest of the day. Of course, I need to take a little more rest, but my mind seems fairly clear and I have managed to get through my translation work reasonably well. I just figure that the exercise helps blood flow and so my mind is fairly alert when I am trying to decipher some obscure sentence in Chinese.
The other morning as I was taking a final look through a research paper I had edited, as I sat by the lake a few minutes from our home, I saw a turtle basking in the sunshine on a large log of wood floating in the water. Its shell was about 12 inches from end to end. It sat there for over two hours while I was there and finally disappeared into the water. The turtle gave me a lot of inspiration. Maybe some of us are slow or appear to be dumb, but we still have a lot of good qualities. The turtle did not seem to be in a hurry, unlike the birds I usually see, and that may be a secret of the reptile's long life. I will post a picture of my new found friend one of these days.