I haven't even started work yet and already I'm up until midnight frantically trying to finish things up. I miss the retired life before it's even ended -- not a good sign. I must keep repeating: "consulting is a means to an end... it is just a means to an end..."
Having survived four days at the new job I'm on the verge of becoming useful to them. For me, the first day of any new job is generally spent making an ass of myself as I try to learn how to use the copier, get lost going to the bathroom, and greet the senior VP by the wrong name. By day two I've found the soda machine but still can't send e-mail, and I ask enough simple questions to make my co-workers wonder if I'm brain damaged. Day three finds me confidently making my way from my desk around the floor, but invariably ends in disaster as I discover my card key hasn't yet been activated and I have to wait in the lobby for fifteen minutes until someone can come let me back in. Day four is my first real chance to screw up something important, and by day five I've hit rock bottom and have no where to go but up. With that in mind I'm very much looking forward to tomorrow, my fifth day.
In all seriousness, things have been going reasonably well and I like the people I'm working with (honestly, I'm not just putting that here since they might some day read this journal). I finally found a place to live, and the housemates seem to be interesting people (an artist, two architects, and a writer), but the best part about my living arrangement is the two German shepherds, Fundy (three months) and Argus (three years). These dogs might be the coolest canines ever. My daily routine now goes something like this: work - run - play with the dogs for as long as humanly possible - sleep - repeat.
Life has been moving at a crazy pace lately. Drove from Los Angeles to Palo Alto and back over the weekend, arriving in Palo Alto at 2:00 AM Friday night and getting into LA at 1:00 AM last night. In between I enjoyed sushi with Nadia, Zac, Scott and Anna, moved most of the rest of my stuff (the Forrester rules), scanned in my photos from Cambodia (I'll put them on the site when I have a bit more free time) and got in an eleven and a half mile run. Left for work this morning at eight, was actually useful while on the job, joined the gym after work (the outfits the women in LA wear while working out make it worth the price of admission PLUS you get to watch six televisions while using the treadmills) and got home at ten, just in time to play with Argus and Fundy before they went to bed. Also met the last of my housemates, J.C. (not to be confused with my old housemate, J.B.) who is finishing up work on an independent documentary. Hopefully those folks waiting for me to write to them will understand why my e-mail output has tailed off as of late.
One of the odd side-effects of running a lot is that you begin consuming rather insane amounts of food. The average person supposedly needs two thousand calories each day to stay alive. If the treadmill is to be believed then I burned an additional twelve hundred calories while running tonight, so I should need thirty-two hundred calories today to keep from losing weight. For lunch I ate two foot-long Subway sandwiches, and ate another for dinner, but I've still dropped a bit of weight this week. What that means is that just to maintain my weight I'll probably need to up my diet to three and a half feet of sandwiches per day -- forty-two inches of sandwiches! That's a midget. One midget worth of sandwiches each day just to keep from losing weight. Utter madness.
Spent an excellent weekend in Phoenix with friends. Chi and the Tall Guy came through with their usual shenanigans, including dozens of stories involving my brother and vomit. The best of these was a tale that ended with Adam shaking Aaron up and down by the ankles while holding him over the toilet, trying to find out if the goldfish that Aaron had just swallowed was still alive. Beth bravely made it through this dinner and immediately afterwards whisked me off to a holiday party with many people from Intel and much alcohol. Any party that finds Beth fully clothed in a hot-tub and Chris (Beth's friend) roaming around the living room in a towel without anyone so much as turning their head has to be considered a success.
Chris is also training for a marathon, and despite battering his liver last night was planning to run fifteen miles today. Hearing him talk about eighty mile weeks and his long runs made me feel like a slacker, so I hit the gym with more determination than normal tonight. I managed twelve miles, which is good for me at this point. The weigh-in before I ran was 154, and after running I was at 149. The math says that had I run a full marathon (twenty-six miles) I would have dropped eleven pounds, but somehow I think there must be something I'm missing in that equation.
If the scales are to be believed then I dropped six pounds while running tonight. I therefore decided to take drastic measures, and a pint of Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia ice cream is no more. As if a good run and a pint of ice cream wasn't enough happiness for one night, the local grocery store doubles coupons, so Dr. Pepper only costs $0.26 for a two liter. Maybe I'm simple for being impressed by things like a good run and cheap Dr. Pepper, but if that's the case then simple and happy is fine by me.
It struck me last night that Christmas is practically here, and suddenly all I can think about is getting home on Tuesday night and stringing lights all over the house with my brother, then spending Wednesday with the family laughing as we go through the annual gift exchange. I'm going to be an absolute cyclone of Christmas energy by the time the plane lands Tuesday night.
Aside from holiday joy the last few days have been relatively uneventful. The weekly running mileage was slightly over sixty, and that's the first time in my life that I've done so much. I'm still not in the shape I was in during college, but I can feel myself getting there. It's an amazing feeling to be able to run under six minute mile pace again, or to actually feel good after running ten miles. Life is treating me very well at the moment -- hopefully everyone else is filled with a similar amount of joy during this holiday season.
Stumbled on http://www.unitedforpeace.org/ while browsing the web tonight. Sorry about the down message during the holiday season, but the whole situation with the government right now feels like something out of a bad sci-fi movie rather than real life, and I've been having occasional nightmares where my brother was drafted and had to fight people that he had no good reason to be fighting with.
Apologies for the recent site outages -- since I moved out of my old place the server also had to be moved to the new Ma and Pa Holliday hosting facility in sunny Concord, California. Hopefully things will run smoothly from this point onwards.
The Browns somehow made it into the playoffs. While no one seems to be able to explain how this happened, every person who currently or has ever lived in northeast Ohio is celebrating wildly. If they beat Pittsburgh in the first round pandemonium will most definitely ensue.
