State of the Kate

It has been brought to my attention by multiple people that I haven’t been posting. Thank you, multiple people, for missing me. 🙂

I’ve been trying to keep focused on work while I’m at work, and to stay productive when I’m at home. One of my goals this year was to cut down on LJ and email use, after all, and I’m doing it. I set up a series of filtered friends lists that capture varying degrees of keeping up: the narrowest includes just a few close friends about whom I always want to know the latest. And the rest are increasingly broad. When I find myself with a little bit of time, I hit the personal friends list and read up. I try to comment, if I have enough time. If I have more time, I’ll hit the next broadest list, and so on. It seems to be working. I just haven’t been good so far at keeping my own journal updated within the pinched time constraints.

Anyway, here’s what’s going on in my offline world:

I’m working like a fiend. More to the point, I think I’m working like someone with something to prove. It isn’t that the hours are longer; I’m just hell-bent to get as much out of my day as possible. I don’t know if my motivations are healthy, but my results are great, so I’m not questioning it much.

Since my massage last Friday, I’ve actually been able to run again! I put in a slow 30 minutes (just under 3 miles) on the treadmill Monday morning and gave myself a day off Tuesday, just doing yoga/stretching/ballet at home before going to Starbucks (see next note). Then I ran another slow 30 minutes yesterday, and gave myself this morning off with just some pilates/stretching at home. Tomorrow I’ll run another slow 30 and take the weekend off completely. Then, if I’m able to, I’ll start a low daily mileage plan on Monday, with some strength training on low mileage days. I’m psyched! For the first time in four months, it looks like I might actually be able to run the half-marathon at the end of April.

I went to Starbuck’s Tuesday morning and, in ‘s studious company, I worked on a million billion things. It was a super productive morning, even with the pleasant distraction of popping in to get his triple-shot whatever-it-is he gets that gets him buzzin’ like a nuclear generator, baby. 🙂

Karsten and I are screening realtors. We want to find someone who can help us find a good investment house. Our thinking is that, whatever property we buy, we’ll renovate and flip it within a few years, and we’d ideally like to work with someone now who’ll work with us long term as we become more serious real estate investors.

Karsten finished a complete draft of the melody that goes with my favorite of all the lyrics I’ve ever written. I’ve been hearing sections of it while he’s worked on it, and I thought he was on the right track, but now that I hear it all together, I just love what he’s done with it. I almost cried when I heard it. It’s taken him a lot longer than most songs have because I think this style was a little bit alien to him. I wrote the lyrics and the dummy melody with a decidedly Hall & Oates influence, but it’s meant to be able to be covered as a pop-country song. I could hear in my head how that would work, but I had a bitch of a time getting it across to Karsten. Happily, he did something different from what I came up with, and, of course, it’s far better. It still needs polishing, but this one is getting demo’ed for sure. I have the MP3 of his scratch vocal demo on my Clie, and I’ve probably listened to it 20 times today. 🙂

I say “thanks so much” at work a lot. I wonder if hears me saying it and if she does, if it makes her wince.