This is a good day. I earned a couple more Garmin badges, the 15 hours of walking activities, Time to Walk badge and this one:

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Welcome to the Year of the Dragon, the wood variety, with the last one in 2012, of water.

I earned them both in today's 4:23 AM walk, an 8-mile painting across Bartlett. I picked up some new canvas in a couple of neighborhoods and took the circumference of East Hill. Naturally, it was in the rain, a mandatory feature of my extended walks.

And I gotta tell ya as the MMORPG druid, Thundercast, I love walking in thunder and lightning—truly, I do! With the first crack, I went from playing Chris Brown's Forever as featured on The Office to AC/DC's Thunderstruck. Indeed, "I was lightning before the thunder."

An element of this year I like is how it lines up with the leap year of 1996. Today's February 10 is a Saturday as it was in 1996. And I look back with fondness as I flip through the 1996-1997 student bullentin for the University of Memphis and its University Calendar. How I would love to be transported to Spring '97 just as I was skipping Wednesday's classes on February 26, 1997 to click-clack step into the reflecting-floor-new Wolfchase Galleria!

To date and throughout this year, I'll be listening to a LONG favorite from that 1996-1997 era, Robert Miles' Dreamland (1996), a CD I purchased for an inflated amount of cash at that mall and was prominently featured among my circle of friends.