Every year, I have a tiny contest with myself to go the whole year without screwing up the date. I managed this feat in 1993.
This year’s status: Failure on day 2.
What is truly amusing is I thought I’d screwed up on day 3, but then I looked at my training log and realized I’d screwed up the day before, without seeing it. Oops.
How are you doing?
I read a lot of skeptics blogs. This is good, and bad. It’s bad because some of them go way overboard in the casting away of anything unrational (not irrational, just unrational). A prime example of this is the New Year’s Resolution, as well as the whole concept of the western New Year. Some skeptics come out of the woodwork to question the utility of the New Year’s celebration because it’s just an arbitrary marker during the year.
I agree. It is entirely arbitrary.* But, who cares? These types of mileposts are perfect because they give us an opportunity to come together, as friends, family, coworkers, fellow terranauts, whatever, to celebrate another arbitrary time period. Birthdays do this. So do our various national holidays. Given our penchant for numbering our orbits around the solar furnace we call the Sun, it only makes sense to pick a day, and call it the first day of the New Year. Or, we could be entirely arbitrary and increment the new year every time we reach opposition with Mars, but that would be weird.
The New Year’s Resolution falls firmly into the unrational category. It only makes sense to have goals, but why don’t we emphasize New Month’s Resolutions, or New Week’s Resolutions? Why only write down these firm resolutions every year?
Tradition! And I’m a firm believer in some traditions, despite any unrationality.
Therefore, my New Year’s Resolutions:
*The weirdest part of this New Year’s eve was when our neighborhood dry cleaning provider, a very nice lady who is obviously a former chinese national, wished me a “Happy New Year!” I wondered to myself if I should come back next month to wish her one, as well.
**Steve Runner is the podcaster at the helm of Phedippidations, a running podcast. His tagline is, “thoughts, opinions, observations, and rambling diatribes composed during distance long runs”. Thanks, Steve!
One year ago today I underwent LASIK surgery (don’t click on the link unless you’re not afraid of close-up images of eyeballs!)
So far so good! No issues. No haloing or dry eye any worse than what I had with contacts. I have my last post-surgery checkup next week.
I wake. I ache. I sit. I drink coffee. My head go throb.
I race 10k.
Silliness.
I’ll let you know how it went in about two hours.
Today I hearken for the heady days of no electronics. Why? Because it’s really damn difficult to keep all of my gadgets and computers and infonodes synched up to current information. At the moment, I’ve given up a bit. My 5 year old PDA has kicked (sort of), and it’s a pain to try and synch my home computer calendar/contacts (Outlook) to my work computer calendar/contacts (Outlook). Jenn and I have just started using Google Calendar for most of our scheduling, plus there’s this wireless talkie device I have in my pocket. Like I said, At the Moment, none of these things talk to each other. Additionally, Jenn and I will more than likely be purchasing snazzy mo-bile dee vices come this spring when our two year committment to T-Mobile is up. Thusly another set of doo-dads to keep in contact. It’s a pain, and I’ve got to figure out where the main repositories need to be. They’re not going to be all in one spot, for example my work contacts generally happen at work so I can’t give up keeping info on my work computer, but then there’s no need for all of my personal contacts to be kept there (and backed up by the company, which bugs me a bit). My calendar has already made the jump to hyperspace by transferring to Google, but google calendar is still a bit flaky so I feel I need an offline (or at least off-web) version to view when necessary. This would optimally be both of my Outlooks, if I could get them to synch up with Google. It would be GREAT if I could get my phone to talk to everybody, but the phone I have now is memory-anemic and not up to the task, even if I had the cords and software to do it.
I’m exploring a utility called ScheduleWorld that might allow me to do all of the above. I’ll let you know how it goes.
I know I’ve mentioned previously my tendency to have too much stuff going on. I need to focus!
That being said, here is the list of things that are on the burner for the near future:
TalkingTraffic Podcast. I really need to do that tonight. I usually post it by midnight this morning, but obviously not today.
Work! Gosh, think about who pays for this website!
Christmas. Not as big a deal this year, but there’s christmas cards, and I need to prepare my annual present of photo album pages to the family.
Train. The Resolution 10k is in a month +6 days and there’s no time like the present. Plus I need to get back onto the bicycle and into the pool.
Create! There’s this camera thing I have that has been neglected recently. Plus I’ve got two blogs, one podcast, and two web projects to work on.
Read. My pile keeps getting bigger… [sigh]
Clean! The house is a bit of a mess. Our goal is to have it spic and span by Saturday when we put up Christmas decorations.
Tonight is Train, Cook, Clean, Podcast, Sleep. I know at least three of those will get done.
As the most recent post apprises you, I and my wife ran in the Tulsa Route 66 Half Marathon on Sunday, November 18. The decision to do this race was mine, and she nicely tagged along with me. I had figured that it would be a good opportunity to do a half, and I didn’t particularly want to run either the half or the full in Atlanta on thanksgiving (I don’t like the route; it’s boring). (more…)
I ran the Tulsa Route 66 Half Marathon today. This was my first every half-marathon. Go me! This was cool on several levels, including that I’ve never run this far before in my life. But it was also cool because I went in thinking, “Oh…2:24, 2:15, something like that for the time.” Instead, I turned in a 2:03:20, which is a 9:25 pace. Wow. I was totally not expecting that. Even better, I managed to turn in negative splits for the whole race, where each subsequent mile is faster than the one before it. (more…)
Recently I alluded to my flittering attention span when it comes to hobbies. I’ll pick something up and be, like, totally into it for a while and then it fades to a second tier status. I’ve made inroads in the past few years to cut back on this tendency, attempting to set aside those things I know I’ll never get back to, disposing of the corpse, if you will.
There’s been a few things in the past year that I’ve made a strong commitment to and am attempting to keep up there on top level priority status. This blog is one, although it slips back occasionally. My Podcast is another, although it, too, slips back. The few things that occupy front and center priority are 1) my wife 2) my job 3) my fitness, pretty much in that order. As things are going, I’m doing fairly well on these three, but we’re about to hit a milestone and/or stumbling block for number 3. (more…)
Today I’m home sick. Bleah.
You might think that this would let me catch up on blogging. We’ll have to see about that. Unfortunately, where I really want to be is at work, ’cause I have stuff to do, and limited time in which to do it. I find this unfortunately hard-and-fast hitting cold very untimely. Not to mention that it is playing hobb with my half-marathon training (which is in a week and a half).
If you see a flurry of posts, now you know why.