3 miles, 24 minutes

Inspired by Ham­mer­head’s exam­ple, I’ve start­ed incre­ment­ing the time I’ve been run­ning on the tread­mill up from 25 min­utes to 30. I ran 35 min­utes a few days ago, but I don’t like to do more than 30 at the gym when it’s crowd­ed and there are peo­ple wait­ing to get on the machines.

My first goal was to hit 3 miles in 25 min­utes, and I achieved that goal a cou­ple weeks ago. Yes­ter­day I made my sec­ond goal, which was 3 miles in 24 min­utes. Three eight-minute miles. Hooray!

So now it’s time for anoth­er goal. I’m think­ing that four miles in 30 min­utes is a good tar­get to aim at. It’s fair­ly ambi­tious com­pared to where I am right now; it means I’ll have to run four 7.5 minute miles. But that also means it’ll feel real­ly good to make the goal. This last one did­n’t seem all that earth-shattering.

Today at work is real­ly messed up. The print­ers I work with have been hav­ing mechan­i­cal dif­fi­cul­ties, and there’s all kinds of pres­sure to do things that we just can’t get done. As much as I like some o this tech­nol­o­gy, I don’t like being reliant on tech­nol­o­gy that’s more com­pli­cat­ed than I can fix.

I recall how much pride I used to take in car­ing for my pens. I have a set of Rapi­do­graphs that I used to use for a lot of illus­tra­tion work. They are good pens, but they do need to be cleaned and cared for. I enjoyed the process of mak­ing sure that my pens were well-maintained.

These print­ers are anoth­er sto­ry. Every bit I can learn about how they work, I still remain way over my head and depen­dant on tech­ni­cians to fix prob­lems when some­thing goes wrong. And I am the one respon­si­ble for mak­ing sure that every­thing goes right. Basi­cal­ly, I am respon­si­ble for out­comes that are out­side my con­trol and I don’t like that one bit.

My super­vi­sor is back from vaca­tion, so if I get a com­mit­ment from one of my clients for me to do some work, then I can put in my notice. I was real­ly uncom­fort­able with the idea of putting in notice while my super­vi­sor and also the pres­i­dent of the com­pa­ny were out of the coun­try. I’d still rather that the pres­i­dent of the com­pa­ny was back before I give notice, but ulti­mate­ly, I have to let the offers com­ing my way deter­mine the timing.

Hope­ful­ly I’ll be able to make it to my med­i­ta­tion group tonight. I hate miss­ing it, and most­ly I hate it because I’m not good enough about draw­ing bound­ries at work and there­fore end up stay­ing here way too late.

Got­ta get out of this place.