Of Moose And Men
The Best Laid Plans Of Both Often Go Astray

Went to see Enchanted with BC on Monday. I most decidedly did not cry at the end; I had something in my eye. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, so there.

Dinner tonight with RNJTM to talk Ironman and life in general. Should be fun, as always.

Seeing BC Friday & Saturday & hopefully Sunday as well. It’s to be a full weekend – Grubbycrawl tomorrow, two events on Saturday, plus the start of the USAT club challenge (meaning I have to get off my butt and go swim and run). Looking forward to all of it, and looking forward to doing all of it with BC. We’ve had some integration of stuff with friends, but are still working on the mutual introductions. He gets to meet more of mine this weekend, which’ll be good.

So, if all goes right in a year I’ll have finished an Ironman race. Let’s let that sink in. An Ironman. Wow. This is definitely a big deal.

A 2.4 mile swim to start, 112 miles on the bike in the middle, then 26.2 miles of running, a full marathon at the end. It’s easy to see why they allow racers 17 hours to finish the race (7 a.m. to midnight).

I’ve known for years that I eventually wanted to complete an IM race. It’s all RNJTM‘s fault – he generously took me up to see him race his 3rd 4th IM Canada in 1999 and ever since it’s been sitting in the back of my brain, waiting for the right time to happen. When IM Arizona announced a second race in 2008, with easy online registration, well, I jumped at it. After an hour or so of contemplation, that is.

This isn’t something one can enter into lightly – it’s going to involve a lot of time, and a lot of foregoing of other activities. Folks who’ve done marathons know what I’m talking about – early bed times, not going out drinking with friends, and lots of time on the road. Just add “in the pool and on the bike” to the “on the road” part.

I know where my first steps are, getting back to my regular exercise routine, reducing my caffeine and alcohol intake, and spending some quality time working on swimming technique. The swim is my big limiter (along with nutrition) – if I can keep my heart rate down during the swim, not have a panic attack, and stay on a good rhythm, then I can get through the rest of the race much more easily than I’ve done to date. I’m getting there, but it definitely needs polishing. Get to test that in May here locally, thankfully.

Did get in a swim this evening, mostly drill work to retrain me how I should be feeling in the water while I’m swimming. It did help – wasn’t terribly fast, but was more comfortable than it’s been in a while.

I’m still processing the magnitude of signing up for this race. I know I can do it. Might not be terribly fast, but I know I can finish it with the right training. Doesn’t mean it’s not intimidating, or freak-out worthy, but I know I can do it. The fun part is going to be the long runs and rides well into cooler weather here in DC (October and November), then adapting to the warmer temps in Tempe.

But before that, it’s getting the base built up, which is where I find myself now. Wow. This is going to be a lot of work.

Not content to stay put, and despite my resolve to race less next year, I just signed up for Ironman Arizona, 23 November, 2008.

Yes, I am insane.

Work has been torture today – it’s my last day in the office until next week, and on top of that our email went down for most of the day (after the firedrill at 10, that is). The network is still hosed for getting at documents, so trying to work on a lot of things isn’t the easiest thing today.

Since my last serious update I’ve run a 5k with BC & his family (local turkey trot this past weekend), made progress in both Super Mario Galaxy and Twilight Princess, picked up a couple more games on sale, found out my year-end bonus is coming (hello, new oven), had a soup & bad movies party, and have been otherwise occupied with life. BC & I are doing well. I’m headed down to see my folks for Thanksgiving, partially to see them before they take off for Florida for the winter, and partially so I don’t force the whole vegan thing on BC’s mother on the first major holiday she’s known me. She and her husband are doing well with it, but I am a bit sensitive to such things.

Back on the subject of games, what nimrod at Nintendo thought fishing would be fun? I spent a good 10-20 minutes yelling at the screen (“This is not fun! This is not entertaining!”) while trying to fish in the damned Ordon village before I gave up and googled the answer – you have to wiggle both controllers side to side, not up and down as Nintendo tells you to do. Once I switched I caught the requisite fish easily, but that was decidedly Not Fun, unlike the rest of the game. They’re lucky its not a larger part of the plot or I’d have been tempted to sell the game. My time is too precious to me for un-entertaining games.

And I beat Puzzle Quest on the DS finally. BC’s envious, he’s still working on it. I saw they ported it to the Wii as well, but I don’t see how the game would be much fun without the stylus and touch screen of the DS.

[…]

I love trying to explain legal citations to folks. Case in point, I was just telling one of my budget folks about 3 provisions of law she needs for footnotes, and for each one there at least 4 different ways to cite it – the amendment which gave us the funds acceptance authority (section XXX of public law YYY-YYY), the original section which was amended (section AAA of public law BBB-BBB, as amended), the US Code cite (cc USC dddd, note), and a statutes at large cite (eee STAT ffff), and all four were useable depending on her audience (Tre*sury, for example, only wants cites to the Statutes at Large). I told her to go with the code cites for our internal reference – they’re easier for non-lawyers to find, in my experience.

Anyway, haircut & laundry & playing on the Wii tonight, then driving to Tidewater tomorrow for the holiday. Hopefully will be a nice, quiet time.

Just out of a meeting with that worst kind of bureaucrat – the one who is constitutionally incapable of summarizing anything, even facts well known to all participants, and who must drone on at every chance he can, expounding at great lengths on the obvious.

Shoot
Me
Now

This is same guy who, when asked for a one-page summary, insists upon producing a 10 page treatise. Meetings with him are always painful, and always run over, unless you can somehow limit his ability to hijack the discussion. And he’s very good at insinuating himself into any conversational thread, no matter the topic.

Is it 6 pm yet? I’m done for today.

Children should not be allowed out without adult supervision. Case in point, the kids running down the wrong way on the escalator to make the train in the Metro. At least they didn’t stop the thing like the last group of urchins I encountered on their way home from school.

And yes, this does make me a grumpy old man. Which makes the fact that BC’s mom keeps hinting at wanting us to have kids all the more amusing (amusing to me, not so much to him, but then again she’s not my biological mother – my own mother has said nothing of the sort and seemed kind of surprised when I mentioned children).

Heading back to the office after getting a sty looked at. Nothing big, and thank heavens Metro is reliable most days, allowing me to zip out & back without too much delay.

[side note – did we not outlaw mullets yet? Why would someone wear something so bad looking on their head?]

Tourists are out in force today. I’d have expected more of them next weekend rather than this weekend, given the holiday.

Heading to the cooking expo this weekend with BC to drool over ovens & cooktops I can’t yet afford or fit into my kitchen. I enjoyed it last year, and am looking forward to checking out the gadgets. I’d like to find a place that offers a knife skills class that’s both convenient and that won’t try to make me do something like de-bone a duck. I’m not holding my breath on that, but I’ll keep my eyes peeled.

There are days when you have all of the answers, and days when you don’t. Today, thankfully, was the former and not the latter. Tomorrow is anyone’s guess.

I’ve been thinking a lot about work and being an attorney. Next year is ten years out from law school for me, and despite the occasional clusterfuck at work, I think I’ve gotten into a pretty good groove where I don’t feel like I’m just acting confident when dealing with clients, I actually am self-assured, because I’ve been doing this long enough to know what I’m talking about in my practice area most days. It’s a confidence that sort of snuck up on me when I wasn’t looking, and was a bit startling to realize was there.

Not to say that I think I’m all that and a bag of chips, but the advice giving business is a lot easier when you know what I do about the BGA now that I’ve been there for almost four years. I’ve still got a ton to learn, but it’s nice not feeling like I’m faking it all the time.

Of course, this will all go right out the window once Congress gets around to changing the budget rules again, but for the moment it’s a good feeling.

Today was flying in and out of meetings, reassuring program staffs that they weren’t in trouble, promising things which will be delivered in short order, and generally was most people’s best friend. It’s so much nicer when you can be helpful and not have to say no (because you don’t have to, here). The nay saying will come back soon enough (and is occasionally nice in and of itself when your client is being a ninny, but is generally more of a pain than anything else – I mean, who wants to deliver bad news to someone?).

[side note – I’m so used to old-school WYSIWYG web editing programs which insert a paragraph tag when you hit a return and a break tag when you hit shift return, that this new version of WordPress is a bit disconcerting in its word-processor-like behavior when it inserts only a break when you hit return once, and a paragraph when you hit it twice. How new school. oh, and I miss the “html lookup” button, which appears to be obsolete now that it’s keeping tags visible in the editing screen.]

I put in a WordPress plug-in that will allow me to post more easily from the iPhone. I did confirm with it this morning that I have to be determined to post, though, since if I leave the browser to do a lot of other things it tends to lose the post. I’ll have to play with it more to see if it’s possible to save and come back to something.

The LiveJournal one is cross-posting stuff well, too, even if it doesn’t allow me to choose the user pic from WordPress any more.

And on that note, I’m exhausted and need to crash.