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

After some work by my ISP, I am up and running again on WP, and on the site. So I plan to start updating here, as well as on LJ and DW.

The slow building back I wrote about last month is, well, slow. But that’s okay. Having the discipline to slow myself down, go for less distance at a lower heart rate, is paying off. I’m feeling better. I’m (mostly) sleeping better (more on that in a moment). And things are a bit calmer overall.

The course ended up being completely worth the time. It was a ton of information, which I’m still digesting, but again well worth it. Now I just need to finish reading the manual and fill in the quiz so I can finish that last part of the certification process. In the meantime, with the slow down in training, I’m also bailing on my first race. I’m just not ready for it, physically, so I’m aiming for the next one in June, a sprint here in downtown. I’m going to take the day after the May race off, however, as planned, so I can use that as a reading/quiz day and hopefully finish that up. It would be nice to be “Coach Moose” before the end of this year’s newbie program.

Sleep is mostly better, save when I’m sleeping over at the new boy’s place. Yup, seeing a new boy. He works for a local university as a resident director, so lives on campus, plus he has a dog, and no car (where I do have a car), so it’s just easier for me to stay over up there when we stay together. But that’s meant adjusting to a new bed, and a new person in said bed, and learning his/our sleeping patterns. I’m gradually learning it, but man those early mornings are tough. Thankfully the commute from his place in the morning is pretty smooth, so it’s been relatively easy to get up and get down here to SW to work out. When I don’t sleep in a bit, that is. Otherwise it’s going well. We’re taking thing slowly, trying not to rush into anything (though, yes, overnight stays are a part of that).

LJ (which I do still read daily) for some reason completely reset my theme today while I was at work. Found the one I was using and reapplied it, but that was annoying when I looked at my Fiends’ List this evening. Too few entries, and all the wrong colors. No thanks!

I don’t often go back into my archives to read entries. While I enjoy the writing, and the occasional bit of feedback, I don’t often feel the need to wander back through things. But it is nice to have them, especially when someone from your past pops up and you have this nagging sense that you remember who he is, but can’t quite place him.

In this instance it was AH, a young man with whom I’d flirted a great deal, and had a couple short dates with back in 2003. He found me over on Loopt and dropped me a message this morning while I was home dealing with my allergies. He happened to mention that he was glad he remembered the nickname I’d given him on here, so that set me to searching to see if a) I could find my old archives, and b) if I could find him. Good on both counts.

Had an interesting time wandering through the past ten years of online writing (started in October of 1999). A lot has happened in that time, pleasant memories and not-so-pleasant ones. I do see that I used to write a lot more about the minutiae of life, which was I suppose a bit easier when I did more in terms of going out, and when there were fewer of us doing this online diary thing. I also see I was consistently reticent to go into great details about work (smart), and not so reticent about certain details of what others might consider one’s private life. So be it. I certainly don’t regret (most) of what I’ve written, and in many ways I’m glad to have the record, if for no other reasons than to catch up on where I’ve been and see where I might be headed.

With two or three more exceptions, I believe I’ve made it through my obligations for the holiday party season. This past week was a constant stream of events, and while I loved each of them in turn, in the aggregate it was a bit overwhelming. Several days I had 2 events in a day, and while tried to pace myself for eating, it wasn’t easy. Add to that the fact that so much of the food at this time of the year has dairy in it and I end up eating far too much that either has dairy in it, or far too much “sometimes” food because I know it doesn’t have dairy in it. Either way isn’t the best way to nosh.

But, back to the grind tomorrow, including time in the pool after work before heading out to dinner with a friend to celebrate the end of his semester. Two of the events this week were with the club, and they and one of the parties which seemed to be all skinny little 20-somethings served as due notice that, being able to run or not, I have to get back to regular training now. In the first place, I have signed up for races, and it would be good to be prepped for at least two of the sports (and, hey, if all else fails, maybe I can do a “aquavelo” IM – where you do the swim and bike but not the run portions of an iron-distance race). And I’m trying to plan out a weight routine, using Strength Training for Triathletes, which I’m finding to be pretty informative and useful.

The piercing is better than it was with the old jewelry, but still a trifle sore at times. Nothing like waking up at 2 am and wondering if you’d feel better at that immediate moment if you were more of a masochist.

Upgraded WordPress this evening, finally. I think I was 3-4 versions behind the most current. They’ve managed to make upgrading the plug-ins pretty darned painless, and it’s a shame they can’t do the same with the site files themselves. In comparison, even though it really doesn’t take that long, it seems to take an eternity. They’re a victim of their own success there. Cross-posting seems to be working just fine, which is a relief (other versions have broken it). All in all I’m impressed with the latest interface, it’s much nicer than previous ones, but not overly complicated.

And with that, it’s time to crash here.

I feel very, very sorry for our IT folks today. Our network connections (email, internal drives) went down sometime right after lunch, and stayed down all day (and, from the lack of email on my work crackberry tonight, looks to still be down). Not fun, and I’m sure they were sweating buckets trying to get it all back up.

In the meantime, with no access to pretty much anything I need to actually write things, I worked for a brief while on a presentation I have to give next Friday (before that program seized up and refused to play nice, thankfully after I’d saved my work to the desktop), and then I ended up leaving early along with most of my coworkers since there wasn’t a hell of a lot we could do. I played a lot of Bioshock once I got home (needed to just kill time & monters), and enjoyed the fruits of the slow-cooker’s labor all day, a garlicky chicken stew, which needed a touch more salt and a lot more garlic; eight cloves was not enough to make something ‘garlicky’ in my book.

Cleaned up the slow-cooker and prepped veggies for another batch of stew tomorrow, this time a peanut sauce, after I’d bagged up today’s stew for the freezer. Saved one serving for tomorrow’s lunch.

Finally updated WordPress this evening, both on the main CountFour home page and on the /legalmoose site. Got tired of the constant “a new version is out, update today!” warnings that have been there for a while now. Also popped in some more plug-ins, to make viewing the site friendlier for mobile browsers (thank you for that example, Brian), and to be truly obnoxious and make Twitter go off when I post new things here as well (thank you Brian and Fredo). Put in a new cross-poster for LJ which seems to work better than it had before (since my preferred one stopped working a couple of iterations of WP ago), even if the text box is a bit much. I suspect that’s editable, but I’m not going to worry about it tonight.

And with that, I’m off to bed.

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.

Okay, it worked again here, too.

The cross-posting to LJ worked fairly well, though I’m not keen on the fact that I have to go in and manually change the LJ icon on the post rather than doing it through the plug-in; that was a definite plus to Live+Press. It’s a shame the writer of Live+Press didn’t keep up his work.

But now I’m all upgraded, and with less trouble than I thought I’d have. Now it’s time to play with other plug-ins.

Going to try and upgrade my install of WordPress here finally. It’s possible I’ll break a thing or two while in the process, but will try to get up and running as soon as possible.

Since we’re not getting snow any time soon here in DC (it’s getting up to almost 60 today), I decided to add snow to my web page. Yay for simple java script files. Enjoy!

(the instructions and file to add it to your own can be found here)

Started looking at dates for races for next year. Cherry Blossom and the Dismal Swamp look doable – CB’s about 2 weeks before DS, and a 10 miler would be a nice training run for the 13.1 miles. The Rock ‘n Roll Half is also doable, just need to decide if I want to sign up before the end of this month for the cheaper registration.

Upgraded WordPress last night, and fixed Live+Press this evening. L+P was having the same issue it did when I first installed it, so had to look up the fix. Thankfully I knew I could fix the problem, it was just a matter of finding the issue and uploading the errant file again. Yay for easy fixes. Had to upgrade not because I particularly wanted to but the comment spam was starting to become an issue again and that was something up with which I was not going to put. Leave it to security problems to force an upgrade. Thankfully someone put out an unsupported version of L+P so I can still dual post to LimeGerbil.

Along with planning the season I’ve been giving thought to the off-season. I think this year I need to hit the weights more and add some strength that’s been missing. I know I can add the cardio endurance, but I’ve neglected weights and that’s affecting the rest of performance. Plus I’m as vain as the next guy (moreso, many would say; after all that song is about me), and some pretty gym muscles would be nice to go with the other ones. I have pretty nice legs, but the arms are, well, lacking. And the swim would definitely benefit from stronger arms. Not to mention strengthening my back is going to be crucial to doing longer rides as I lengthen my triathlon distances. Nothing worse than coming off the bike with a back that’s ready to kill you (takes a couple miles to work that out, making the beginning of the run pretty painful).

MG and I went to the local BDSM club’s S&M 101 course last night, this one on restraints. Was remarkably easy to do the body harness once they showed us how to put it together. A useful skill, and one that I suspect will come in handy. Just need to get some cotton clothesline now instead of the thicker stuff I’ve got now (not long enough, and a tad too thick for this purpose). Glad we went, it was fun and informative. Looking forward to next month, impact play (smacking, hitting, flogging, etc.), even though I know I’m not terribly keen on that on the receiving end.