Saturday, October 09, 2010

Bragging A Bit

It's been more of those "lots of things going on but not really a lot to talk about" kind of days. Busy training at work still, and I'm liking the job more as I get into it. I like the variety of things we do, although I hope I get a little more confidence soon, because it's really scary to think "oh man, what did I do this time? Is this sensor having problems because of me?? Did I take down the entire network??" (Note: it's very very unlikely that anything I do will irrevocably screw anything up, but you know me; I'm usually that one-in-a-million case!) We also do a lot of statistical analysis, which I always enjoy for the sole purpose that it lets me make pretty graphs in Excel. (Learn and love Microsoft Excel - it's one of the best tools you can use in the office. Pop the right numbers into cells, make a bar graph with some of them, a line graph with others - approximately five minutes of work, counting font-tweaking time - and a captain will walk by and say "wow, that looks good! Nice work! How long have you been working on this? You should go home!" Trufax!)

I have been able to achieve two of my financial goals so far this year. I have one credit card completely paid off now AND paid for, in cash, the best tickets I could afford to two Blackhawks games - one here in LA against the Kings in November and ONE AT THE UNITED CENTER IN CHICAGO in two weeks!! (Why no, I'm not excited. Wherever would you get that impression??) Actually, four tickets to the Chicago game - my family is going with me! The plane ticket was also paid for in cash. And I should be able to make it to at least one more game this season! I'm very pleased with myself right now.

I'm also proud of myself on the exercise front. I haven't been to the dojahng in several weeks, unfortunately. Honestly, by the time I get home from work, the very last thing I want, or even have time, to do is go out again. So instead, I've been stopping by the gym on the way home from work. Tuesdays and Thursdays are either weights or off-days, and Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays are running days. I use the trail, the track, or the treadmill depending on the weather conditions and the workout, and Saturdays I run in Santa Maria. I have a program set up through Adidas' MiCoach system, which I really like. The workouts are fairly short, usually 16-25 minutes, so it's really easy to do the "Ugh, I so do not feel like running today! But it's only another 20 minutes of my life and then I can go home and sleep!" thing. I have it set where I do three days of interval training, including one day of sprints, and one day of a steady run. The only thing I don't like about it is that the GPS doesn't work so good with the iPhone, which really screws up your distance and pacing results. I'm thinking about getting a different compatible GPS tracker to see if that helps. I think I've been actually averaging around 2 miles per workout, though, and honestly, having it set up in advance makes it so much easier to stay motivated. I've been really consistent with it so far, and, while I still don't like running, I do think I am getting closer to being back to where I was at before.

I think that's about it for now. I just finished a conversation with a friend in Seattle, and all the games I care about today are much later this afternoon/evening, so it's probably a good time to run some errands and hit the library to finish up term paper research. Thank goodness it's a three-day weekend - the paper is due Monday night! ;-)

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