I can hardly believe it's been a month since I last posted. Admittedly, life has been very busy, and work is all manner of stuffy and formal and "we don't care that all your work is done, don't go on The Intarnetz!" Anyways. Highlights ( Read more... )

What with work, climbing, and fitness training for a 5k race in March, I feel like I hardly get the chance to jump on LJ anymore. What's going on, o flist? What have I missed in the past couple of weeks? Any links would be much appreciated. : )

I'd really rather not be home sick, since work continues to pile up and I still wasn't caught up with what I missed from being out in California for Thanksgiving week. That said, today really was necessary, annoyingly -- fever, plus headache that Advil's barely blunting, combined to make Mark an unhappy camper ( Read more... )

Or trying to, anyways.

I've finally settled on the observation that I really, really don't want to be stuck in my current job ten or five or possibly even three years down the road. There's no possibility for advancement, the salary increases are anemic and well below industry standard, and the upper management continues to impose illogical rules ( Read more... )

Opened up iTunes to charge/sync my iPod, and iTunes said there was a new version available, did I want to download? Click "yes", and the download/sync starts... and freezes. And then erases all the music off my iPod. I had to restore the iPod to factory settings, and now it's taking foreeeeeever to resync the 7000+ songs. (That, and apparently ( Read more... )

Tried to run 6 miles this morning, but felt like my energy gave out less than halfway in. I finished it, but in far far longer than an 8-minute-mile pace. Kind of disappointing. Got home, grabbed a shower, decided midway to shave off my beard and moustache. *shrug* Not like it'll take that long to grow back in if I decide I want it back, I ( Read more... )

In what is clearly a case of fate having a sense of quirky irony, the singles event that I thought I was going to miss because of having to be out of state on account of attending my dad's memorial got rescheduled to Saturday, August 7, because the organizer had to have emergency surgery or something ( Read more... )

Then again, I'd say my fatigue is kinda justified. Yesterday I was up early, did a four mile run, then an hour of P90x, then off to work, then down to the Boston Rock Gym (finally lured a co-worker in to try it -- he loved it!). I did an absolute ton of climbing -- like three hours of on-and-off the walls, switching between bouldering, top-roping ( Read more... )

It feels so very, very nice to be able to fit into certain clothes again, what with all the exercise I've been pushing myself to do. Now if I can just figure out how to adjust my posture so that I don't seem tense and kinda unapproachable by default, and flip my mental attitude to not be quite so self-critical and negatively reinforcing ( Read more... )

Marcel Proust once wrote:
"We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour ( Read more... )