One Hundred

One hundred blog posts. I'm actually kind of surprised this has survived so long. It continues to be more or less what I want it to be, which is a combination travel journal / photo album / thought recorder. It's not perfect, but that's a failure more of the writer than of the medium; what I want is to become better able to...for lack of any better expression, show you the places I go, not just in pictures, but in words. I'm not great at either, though I pretend I'm getting better at it. Sometimes the descriptions work, usually they don't. If I ever have to make a living off writing, I may be in trouble.

I started this blog back in November of 2005, right before leaving for Seattle, to visit McNeil Island Prison, by far one of my most interesting trips. Since then, I've recorded entries about at least fifteen other trips I've been on. I've been on the road more than that, for certain, but not all trips warrant a blog post, and others might only have been mentioned in passing. I've been all over this country, and traveled to a few others in the meantime; I hope this trend continues.

So, the start of the summer is as good a time as any to take stock of where I'm at. I'm single. Sarah and I broke up about a month ago. It's never fun, but it was mutual, amicable, and that's really the best you can hope for. I've been told, as a kind of backhanded compliment, that I'm easy to break up with. That's fine. Better that than endless drama that does no one any good. We both handled it like adults, and there's no reason that we won't still be friends. End of topic.

What I'm Into:

• I've earned my yonkyu rank in aikido back in February, and I still go to class relentlessly, if I'm in town to be there. It's easy to get behind if you start missing classes, and it's hard to build that endurance and flexibility back up; travel makes it tough, so it's pretty much a requirement of mine that, if I'm in town, I'm in class. If I'm diligent, maybe I can even test again in another year or so. Come to think of it, I need to do some studying, as I'll actually be teaching the class this week.
  
• Still taking pictures. I still succeed more through volume than talent, but that's how that goes. I'm still learning more about taking pictures; I almost never use the "Auto" setting on my camera anymore, opting instead to search for combinations of aperture and shutter speed to accomplish what I want. My next step is to learn more about white balance settings, and light metering. In the mean time, I take a lot of pictures. Some of them even make it to my gallery.
• Fitness: Well, before tonight, I'd have talked about starting a 13-week running program. But %&#@ shin splints have put a damper on that. Session Three (tonight) just didn't happen; I ran for about a minute, total, and walked for about fifteen, logging just a mile. It's galling; I hate the idea of not being able to do something, especially early on. But I'm acquainted with pain; I deal with it at every aikido class I attend. This is a different kind of pain, the kind that is your body saying "If you keep this up, you will injure yourself." And as much as my pride might say otherwise, it's time to take a step back and recalculate how to meet my goals of: losing ten pounds during the summer, and improving my endurance. Running seemed ideal. I'm not a natural runner, and get completely winded after a couple of minutes; the idea that someone can run for thirty, forty minutes is utterly foreign to me, and I want to see if I can do it. I've got a pretty good guidebook on running, with a 13-week program that starts you off nice and easy, repetitions of running 30 seconds, walking 4.5 minutes. Apparently that's too much for me. I say shin splints, but it's really "Tibial Stress Syndrome", where you get some inflammation at the point where a set of muscles attaches to the front of your tibia. So it's back to the old drawing board. I'm going to do some research, talk to the folks at the place where I bought my running shoes (a very knowledgeable bunch), and see what to do next. I'm not giving up, just recalculating.
• School: Well, they don't offer any classes I need during the summer; I will probably be taking Calculus II and some sort of dynamics class during the fall. Come to think of it, I should probably pay my parking ticket so I can find out what I made in Calculus I...

No work travel lined up right now, so I'm thinking that it's time for a vacation; weird, given that I've been traveling so much lately. But it's been work, and a lot of it. An actual break would be nice, and I've got the vacation days to do it.

Time to start on the next hundred blog entries. And if you're still reading the nonsense I write down, hey, thanks.

Matt