Wii Wii Wii

Still haven't joined the gym, but I did buy a Wii over the weekend. My balance is mediocre and the little Wii Fit Plus thing said I'm ten years older than I really am.  Eeek!  I'm also pretty awful at the coordination required to successfully play many of their games.  Oops.  But, I just spent an hour on it doing boxing and some "running" and some yoga and some miscellaneous cardio action.  That was kind of fun.  I suspect I'll be sore in places tomorrow.  I think I've figured out how to make it give me an actual workout rather than trying to string together individual activities (which wastes time in between activities).  I don't think this will replace joining the gym since I can't actually run on the Wii and I still have a half marathon coming up in February. (Now if only the knot in my left lower back/hip area would go away...)

Work has been busy and isn't likely to let up between now and the end of the federal fiscal year on Sept 30th.  I really need to stop wishing for "more work" and instead wish for "enough work". We hosted a workshop last week. Now I need to get my notes pulled together.  I'm going to take a 4 day weekend this coming weekend and head to Chicago, so that gives me even less time than usual to get things done.  I've started practicing defensive scheduling by blocking off chunks of time to prevent people from scheduling too many meetings for me.  The advantage of this is that I can actually get things done.  Lately it seems like I've been spending most of my time in meetings and not so much time actually doing the work that comes from the meetings. That needs to change if I don't want to end up working at home and on weekends too.  I'm ok with accruing extra hours each week, but I have to still use the extra hours up by the end of September and at this rate I won't have enough work done to take the time off!!  Eeep!

I do believe I have a plan laid out for getting the last of the unpacking unpacked and put away.  I am also working on a plan to get rid of more belongings.  Less stuff is good. Next up: writing down my next set of goals.  At the beginning of the year I wrote down that I wanted to have a well-paying fun job that allowed me to challenge myself as much or as little as I wanted and to learn as much or as little as I wanted.  I've got that and I've got it in spades.  Time for a new target.

Latest read: I've been reading On Writing by Stephen King. It's a memoir about writing which he wrote about ten years ago.  I think it could just as easily be called On Reading and I really wish I could have read it in high school so that I actually understood what my English teachers meant when they talked about character development or character-driven stories.  I never quite understood themes or symbolism either, just that there was some sort of extra meaning to things that I never quite saw.  I was (and to some extent still am) one of those simple folks who believes that a cigar is just a cigar 99.8% of the time.  I never have been very good at figuring out what people I know mean if they don't just flat out say it plainly. Imagine how much harder it is to figure out what someone like J.D. Salinger or Mark Twain or Jane Austen means when I've never met them, so don't know how they think.  Anyway, after having read Mr. King's book, I've got a bit of a better idea now.  I'm tempted to go back and read a number of Mr. King's books again to see what extra bits I gain from that. Might re-read some of my old lit books too.  I still have my copies of My Antonia and One Hundred Years of Solitude, plus short story and short novel anthologies.