Where have I been?

And how did I let two weeks go by without a post?

I just did my third and final 20-mile training run for the Cleveland Marathon, and it did not kill me. So I know I'll be able to finish the thing. Now I'm on the couch, full of Gatorade (yuck) and fresh strawberries (mmmmmmmmmmm).

While it is a blatant publicity stunt, I'm glad that Gov. Ted Kulongoski spent a week making a show of living off of food stamps. Maybe I'm just cynical and he got invited to no fancy dinner parties during that week, and the fridge and pantry in the Governor's mansion weren't stocked to outlast the Siege of Leningrad. Still, I'm glad he drew attention to the hunger problem that is so dire in Oregon as well as so many other places. I knew there was a reason I voted for Kulongoski in that last primary before I left Oregon. He's a good kid.

I was of course sad to hear that Mstislav Rostropovich is no longer with us, the man Yevtushenko called "the Human Cello" in his novel about the 1991 Soviet Coup whose name escapes me. As a one time cellist and a lifelong Soviet history buff, I would have loved to sit with him for an hour and listen. He struck me as a less grumpy, less reactionary Solzhenitsyn.

Oh, and Boris Yeltsin--totally missed that one too. Nothing I can add to the voluminous obituaries, really, except that I remember being a college student in Moscow right after his reelection in '96, when he disappeared from the public eye for many months while recovering from a quintuple bypass. I also remember him winning the runoff election by giving a cabinet-level post to the third-place finisher in the first round of voting, Alexander Lebed, only to fire him not long after the runoff. Complicated legacy, democracy and free markets combined with rule by presidential decree and rampant corruption, blah blah blah.