I had four stops and one walking section, which is about the same as I did yesterday. Stop at the corner of mannakee and carr, then again around the corner of nelson and crocus to catch my breath and prepare for the big hills. Third stop was at the bottom of the hill at nelson and college parkway, and the last one was when I realized halfway up that I wasn’t ready to go up the hill to my house without walking. On the second stop, more than halfway done, I drank almost the entire water bottle I brought with me. This is going to be a long road.

So here’s my current goals, in order of term:
(1) get more comfortable with up and down-shifting in-flight.
(2) find someplace that’s much more relatively flat to ride
(3) do that 2.5 mile neighborhood circuit without stops (given the hills, this is actually pretty challenging).
(4) rockville millennium trail circuit (~12 miles)
(5) 20 miles

My real goal is to achieve at least the first 4 by the end of 2009. I’ve got half a year to ramp up and do it… and realistically probably more like now until october-ish… so probably 5 months?

Nice thing is with a circuit this short, after the tiredness and thirst go away I’ve only got a little residual soreness, which doesn’t really impair me all that much the rest of the day…

I’m usually pretty mellow, but the more I read about the LHC the more pumped up I get about it!

It’s interesting though. Now that I’m a full-time employee with a permanent position, I’ve sort of got a different mindset that I’m adjusting to.

See, when I was a student, I was working toward a specific, temporal goal. Even with setbacks, as long as I kept working at it and didn’t fail out, graduation was essentially a temporal inevitability. I always knew it was up ahead, always knew I was working towards some specific goal, some time at which things would resolve themselves if only I could hang on and keep it together until then.

Then I graduated. The temporal inevitability came and went. I survived, I made it, I crossed that line. And I looked ahead, and found another line: finding a full-time job.

I was pretty much always confident that I could get a job. I’m smart, I’m attentive, I’m friendly and generally easy to get along with, and I’ve got pretty absurdly good technical skills. I wasn’t always confident where I would get a job, but the fact of the matter never left me. Working was another temporal inevitable. It was, in my mind, an irrevocable fact that I would at some point in the indeterminate near future get a job.

And get a job I did. I accepted the CACI job in the end of July and started there in September, after really seriously starting the job hunt in September and having to basically choose between two possible places to go. And when I started there, it was as a contractor.

As a contractor on a limited-term contract-to-hire setup, I knew that it was basically inevitable that I would become a full-time employee. Of course, that turned out to be wrong, CACI turned out to be a bad fit for me, and got hit by a nasty budget crunch that caused my contract to get squeezed out. But I spent 8 years in college. I’m used to setbacks. And after a day or so of being confused and disoriented, I stood up and started searching for jobs, regrowing the sense of inevitability that I’d find a job after a couple of very positive, very successful interviews. And find a job I did, as a contractor again. This time on a 3-month instead of a 6-month, but the same deal: temp to perm.

And 3 months went by like nothing. I guess if I can spend 5 months at CACI being bored to tears and have it feel like an eternity, the 3 months just evaporating in front of me was a pretty good indicator that Mitre was a better fit. And then they made me a full time offer that was slightly better than what I’d initially negotiated, and I accepted, and became a full time employee. Again, all these events, to me, had a certain inevitability to them. I knew that it would happen. There was always room for doubt, but there was also always a sense that this was definitely going to happen, at some point. If not here, then somewhere else.

So now I’ve crossed that line. I’ve got a real position without an expiration date. It’s at a company consistently rated pretty high on the “best places to work” lists. It’s got great benefits, great vacation policies, and a healthy culture that really fits me. Things are great.

But now I’m faced with a problem. The only thing I see in the future that I’m confident about, that I see as inevitable is my own death, and that’s not for a long time. I don’t have a milestone to wait for anymore.

See, the last … I dunno, 27 years or so, I’ve been waiting for things. Waiting around to get into elementary school. Waiting to get out of it. Waiting to get out of middle school. Waiting to learn to drive. Waiting to get out of high school. Waiting to finish college. Waiting to get a permanent job. It’s so easy to justify killing time, wasting it, watching it slip by, knowing that the things you want to do are essentially inevitable. But now I am starting to feel guilty about it, because I feel like my time-wasting is finally, actually wasting it.

The momentum is gone. I don’t have anything pulling me forward anymore, so if I want to do anything before I die I’m going to have to do it on my own motivation. There’s nothing else. It’s a little disconcerting.

Maybe it’s time to build my own fire.

Well, part of the reason I only dropped like $100 on it instead of significantly more (other than the fact that I didn’t really have significantly more at the time) was to sort of test the waters, and see if I’d commit to it enough for more investment or if I’d just tinker a little and put it down.

Turns out, that was a good move. See, being huge, I’ve got kind of big meaty fingertips, and no matter what I do, no matter how much I claw up my fingers, I still drag on strings unintentionally, which makes playing chords basically impossible… there’s always at least one, maybe two or three muted strings depending on the chord.

Naturally having a bit of a disadvantage in playing sort of put me off to it, so I never really got too into it. But a month or two ago my roommate (who’s been playing guitar just slightly longer and is a lot more serious about it) convinced me to just walk bass lines on the E and A strings while he played around in the space. And it turns out, I’m a lot better at that than at either the noodly soloing or the chord-heavy rhythm that guitar tends to lean towards.

So I did some thinking, and I started to realize … a bass guitar has more space between the strings, bigger strings (meaning less cutting into fingertips and less callus-building), sounds cool and gives music a pretty good backbone. So I took the Bush-generated stimulus check, and decided to stimulate my personal enrichment level by spending the whole thing on a bass and related equipment.

So now I’ve got an Ibanez GSR200-FM (trifade burst) bass guitar, and a Peavey MAX 112 bass amp (plus cables, a stand, a lesson book, a couple nicer cables). But then I discovered that the MAX 112 is … err … a bit too big and powerful for my room, so rather than return it I dropped the rest of the stimulus check on its little brother, a MAX 158.

So far I’ve put about as much time into playing and learning it as I did in total on the guitar over 8 months, and I’m having more fun. I’ve also got about 6 times as much invested in it… but I already think it was worth it.

So yeah …. I’m learning to play bass!

Bonus! here’s a pic of the bass, my two amps (the little peavey 158 and the hugeass peavey 112), and my roommate’s fender blues junior amp):