rampant curiosity--how do you waste time?

Hey, is it still ok to respond to the OP? I play some chess, and I have a great chess puzzle program when I'm looking for something to do.I run 1-3 hours on Sunday morning before the rest of the family gets up, because I dream of running the Badwater ultramarathon when I turn 50 (135 miles across death valley in midsummer, then halfway up Mt. Whitney). The rest of the week, I have to squeeze the running in where I can.I like to play soccer, and I live in a village with 100 kids, so I get to play some long games here and there.Six of those children are mine, and I live with another couple that also has six children under 18, so I'm lucky to have time even for what I just listed. But with any time that's left, I study sports medicine and theology and argue with y'all.

I watch stars. Right now Venus and Mars are up in the evening and Jupiter and Saturn are up in the morning. I think Jupiter rose about 4:45 this morning, right before a beautiful crescent moon.Uh, I realize those aren't stars.One comment on birds for those of you that remember Stephen Fretwell. He lives in the village with us and has for about a year and a half now. My son Caleb (age 11) and one of his best friends, Elijah, have both been learning about birds from him. Elijah recognizes all sorts of birds now, and we're always asking him what this or that bird is. It feels weird, because Elijah is very short, so he only looks about seven years old, but he knows birds really well.We went to see a bird demonstation by park rangers at an Indian festival at some very old Indian burial mounds near here. The ranger told us about a call he got from a lady who had a hawk patrolling her bird feeder. It was eating her little birds, and she was very distraught. He told her, "Well, it IS a bird feeder." She didn't think that was very funny.

It's CT-ART. I think I have 3.0. As far as I can tell, it's head and shoulders above anything similar. It has over 1000 puzzles, ranging from easy to way out of my league. It's not free. I think I paid $26 plus shipping. It's a European program, so I had to wait a while for it to come in, but you're in England, so that shouldn't be a problem.I have two recommended books for chess improvement that improved my chess playing pretty dramatically. One is The Amateur Mind by Jeremy Silman, and the other is Rapid Chess Improvement by Michael de la Maza. The Amateur Mind has the same material as How to Reassess Your Chess, also by Silman, but in a much more understandable format. I wouldn't recommend Reassess Your Chess to anyone, but The Amateur Mind raised my rating close to 200 points in a few months.There's also some pretty good advice in Chess Master at any Age by Rolf Wetzell. It has ideas for study methods, like writing down positions where you made mistakes so you can study them and writing down principles you want to learn on flash cards. Unlike the other two books, Wetzell's focuses on speed chess, too, though the other two will improve your speed chess as well. The Amateur Mind made it so I was never without some sort of idea on how to proceed in the middle game. I used to get stuck after the opening, scratching my head and thinking, "Well, what do I do now? Attack the king? Are there any tactics available?" No more. Now I always have some idea of how to simply better coordinate my pieces, improve this or that piece's position, or arrange the board to better fit my army.