I started CrossFit proper, after having done three intro classes, on 01 Jun. I’ve managed to keep it going since, five days a week with Fridays and Sundays off. (I missed one Tuesday because of the first PyWebSF meetup.)
In that time, I’ve run a 5K, run a 10K, gained the ability to do overhand pullups, done some ridiculous number of burpees, and lifted serious weights for the first time in my life.
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So last week I started CrossFit proper, that is, not doing intro classes but actual CrossFit classes. In certain respects it didn’t make a difference, since the workouts are still scaled to what I can do. I did five sessions, taking Friday and Sunday as rest days.
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Since I started playing tennis again, I’ve been looking for tips to improve my game. I already knew it could do with a lot of improvement, but unfortunately there’s even more than I had realized.
I’ve been extremely impressed with the annoyingly-named site Fuzzy Yellow Balls. They have a pretty good selection of videos that take you through more or less everything a beginner could want, and plenty that beginner-intermediate players like me could want, also.
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Monika and I have been playing squash at UCSF Mission Bay for about a couple of years, but with a ruleset that was based on our past experience rather than actually looking up the rules. For the past couple of months I’ve had the responsibility of doing that looking up, but have always forgotten about it except when either at the court or on my way there. This evening I finally examined the Wikipedia entry for squash.
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This is the thousandth published post on this site. It’s not the thousandth blog entry per se, since some of the entries on this site predate the blog (some predate the site itself, and indeed my awareness of the web). Still, it’s a fairly major milestone, and (working off a suggestion of Jeff’s) I used Wordle to create a kind of commemorative graphic.
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Despite having written at least twenty-one posts about tennis over the last two years, I haven’t really been playing any. I’ve been on court several times with Monika, which is fun, but she’s a beginner and we don’t play actual games, and seem to have reverted to playing squash instead. Several years ago (I can’t believe it’s been that long) I used to play with Lara, who was at about my level (although her technique is better than mine).
Yesterday an ex-colleague, Jeremy, got me out on court in Dolores Park to play, and I remembered how much I love the game.
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I took my first Intro to CrossFit a while ago (2 Mar) and then failed to go to another for a while. Even though it really wasn’t a tough class.
Despite this lack of commitment, I quite like the philosophy of CrossFit (summarized in the “World-Class Fitness In 100 Words” section on this page), and the reading I’ve done around it suggests that it’s quite effective. So yesterday I pushed myself to go to another intro class.
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I recently started playing the daily Set puzzle again, and was thinking about other ways to play the game without other players.
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I’ve been using Twitter for about three months now. I was fairly skeptical about it, but decided to try it out, and while I don’t think it’s now a completely essential tool, I do find it useful.
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My email server was down earlier this evening, and when it came back up, it didn’t like something about my procmail setup. My brother noticed and shut off my procmail after a while, but for some period, emails to me were getting bounced.
So, if you happened to send me an email this evening, you should send it again.
Last year, the server with my Subversion repository on it died suddenly. I’ve made several attempts to revive it, none of which have worked. I tried to get the data off of it, but had trouble doing this as well. Having been frustrated a number of times, I gradually got used to not having it… which is something I should have fought harder against.
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In this dream, I was apparently some kind of education official. Not an elected representative, but some kind of bureaucrat or “expert” in the education field. I was invited to participate in a major discussion by a politician (I think a Minister) who looked rather like a 40-year-old Séamus Brennan.
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Back at the start of the this year, I set out a bunch of goals for myself for 2009. One of them was this:
Write a summary/review/synopsis of every book I read. This will be a lot harder, I think. Definitely a trickier one, and a hard discipline to maintain, but we’ll see how it goes.
This evening I was asked a few times about whether or not writing was fun, and why I write. I’m not completely sure about the answers.
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There are plenty of reports that the afternoon nap is good for you, and that it increases alertness and clarity of thought.
I’m not a great sleeper generally, and I’ve wondered whether or not sleeping in the afternoon would help. Now that my schedule is more flexible, I’m going to try a 45-minute nap at 15:00 most days and see whether or not that makes any difference. Anyone out there tried similar experiments?
Today was my last day at Metaweb, and I was sad to leave. Naturally I’ll miss the people most, but hopefully I’ll manage to see most of them relatively often.
I’m not exactly sure what’s next, but I’m feeling good about it at the moment, and looking forward to finding out what it is.
Yeah. Weird birthday today. Not bad, but somewhat on the strange side. It’s one of those rounder numbers, divisible by five, and therefore attaches greater significance to itself.
My company party was tonight, so it was kind of like that was a party just for me, and kind of like it had nothing to do with me at all.
It was good to be with people, and especially with friends from work, but strange to be only with friends from work. Strange too to be alone on my birthday; singledom isn’t new, and nor is singledom on my birthday, but somehow it feels particularly odd (and empty) on birthdays to not have a partner, a lover.
The Australian Open is on, and streaming, so I get to witness the struggles of consummately-skilled professionals locked in a strange approximation of combat thousands of miles away.
A taxi driver got a very good tip tonight, doubling up on the fact that i’s my birthday and the fact that taxi drivers make me think of my father, because what was a short period in his life happened at a time that it assumed a lot of significance in my mind and memories.
My birthday is near to the start of the year, and I’m taking advantage of this fact to essentially decide that for me the new year starts now, to try to recapture some of the momentum I had (or thought I had) going into 2009.
Some things to be thankful for, on my birthday: that I got this far at all; that I have the privilege to be somewhat comfortable; friends; family; humor; the fact that occasionally I can write things that aren’t awful; the fact that I live in a time when coding is easily accessible and that I can occasionally code things that aren’t awful; that I have (mostly) full use of my mind and body. Lots of other stuff that’s flickering around in my mind but which resists explicit categorization right here right now.
That I’m still here.
I’ve been sick as a dog since New Year’s Eve—not the best way either to greet the new year, or to travel—and my writing has suffered as a result. Despite extending December by five days, I’m still not going to finish the novel plan in time, and don’t feel confident about any major progress in the next few days… so, back to getting half a chapter plan done per day, which should polish off the remaining 6.75 chapter plans by 18 Jan.
Hopefully I’ll feel better by then, too.
Happy New Year!
That’s goals for the year 2009, not two thousand and nine goals, people.
I tend to start the year with a bunch of ambitions and projects—many of which I even accomplish. Some of them for this year follow.
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I did hit my target of 14 books this month, bringing my total to 75 for the year. Some comments on those follow.
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