Week in Review

See, I strive to be something of a morning person, but most of my friends are night people. I'd ideally like to be getting up with my alarm at 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning, but since I sleep more than the average person (I seem to sleep about eight-and-a-half hours if left to myself) that means I'd have to get to bed around 10 pm. But movies usually keep me out until after 11, and gaming does sometimes as well. On Ultimate nights I usually get home around 11.

So when I get home later than about 9:30 I usually don't write an entry. Which is why I often play catch-up on the weekends these days. Though it doesn't always work out this way.

Many people at work get in between 10 am and noon. I'd love to get in by 9 every day, but I often don't actually get up when my alarm goes off (I don't hit snooze, but I do lie there groggy for 20-30 minutes before actually sitting up), and of course I am trying to go jogging more and hit the gym regularly. Jogging takes me about 30 minutes, and the gym takes me over an hour, all told. So getting in around 10 or 10:30 is not uncommon for me these days. (Fortunately, this is acceptable at Apple.)

Anyway.

Speaking of jogging, I've decided that jogging is The Way for me to lose weight these days. So I am trying to jog more regularly (and hope that my legs don't bother me as much as they have recently), and I'm trying to extend my distance, to build up my lung capacity, which once again seems to be my limiting factor. I'm working on jogging for 20 minutes continuously, which I think should be a little over 2 miles.

So far, so good. Right now I'm jogging for nearly 15 minutes continuously, and pushing my distance from home a little further each day. However, I'm only jogging every second or third day lately. Of course, some of this is due to Ultimate getting cancelled, since I factor that in as my jogging for that day. It involves intermittent sprinting over two-and-a-half hours and is generally higher impact, so it takes a lot out of me.

Anyway, if I can eventually jog 3 miles every other day or so, that would be pretty cool.

Work has been getting very busy lately. I volunteered to investigate code coverage tools we can use to evaluate our automated testing. But that's been about priority #3 for me, since I'm doing a full qualification of the app I test - including testing some things that I haven't myself tested before - and we're doing our test planning for our next release, development for which has been barrelling on for a while while QA has been tied up on the last release. So it's all turning up at once. Fortunately, after next week things should get simpler, as one of those big tasks will be done.

I've also been finding things that I'd like to improve about our automated test plan tracking system (which I maintain anyway), so I've been working on that as well. I might actually go into the office this weekend to make a few larger tweaks to it without distractions.

So it's been pretty lively at work lately. Which is good, actually; I always do better when there are clear things that have to be accomplished (or, of course, which are intrinsically interesting to me), rather than trying to make work for myself.

I've been getting the itch lately to start drawing again. Back in high school and college I did a lot of comic book-oriented drawing, and even took a few life drawing classes. (I also took a painting class and largely learned that painting is not for me.) But it mostly fell by the wayside in grad school; it's been about seven years since I've really drawn something.

Am I any good? Well, I'm not the worst artist in the world. It's probably not ridiculous to think that I could have been a professional if I'd pursued it as a career. Occasionally I still wish I had. But I'm certainly not of pro caliber now.

I've thought about scanning some of my old drawings for a journal entry. ("Look! This is the drawing when I realized that people have chins!") Be afraid, be very afraid. We'll see.

Anyway, I might go by an art store this weekend and round out my art supplies (mainly I need to make sure I have the pencils I want, and buy a new sketchbook). Not that I really need another hobby, but then this is really just an old hobby. I've been being pretty good about not picking up new hobbies.

Of course, I've also been getting an itch lately to go hiking more often...