Last night I was so absorbed in this type of activity that I totally forgot to go to a birthday party that I'd been invited to. Crap! I sent a note of apology, but it was disappointing because it was an opportunity to get to know the person better, which I have no idea when there might be another of.
It's interesting that I seemed to need these periods of unbroken downtime so badly, even though my schedule for the last couple of weeks seems to have given me plenty of 3-ish hour slots of time to myself. I wonder what this need derives from? What I do during them is not very goal-directed at all. My first thought was that maybe I need to insulate myself from outside influences for a while, but I read LiveJournal so that's not it. So my current hypothesis is that my task-switching muscle gets tired after a week of work-social-errands-home-repeat, and what I'm doing on the weekends is trying to spend some time resting it.
Running: is still on track. I posted a comprehensive training schedule (this looks much better in Firefox than IE, for some reason; it is generated from gnumeric -- concidence?), so today I had my longest run period yet, 8 minutes x 2. Tuesday's run calls for 20 continuous minutes. That seems like quite a leap! I'll trust the wisdom of the Couch-to-5k plan, though. Then only 4 weeks until I graduate to the Mileage Buildup schedule.
7 Habits of Highly Effective People & The 8th Habit: I'm nearing the end of this audiobook. I think it would have been a *much* better audiobook if the author hadn't read it. Something about the author's diction strikes me as uneducated, somehow (even though he is a highly educated person). He tends to get emotionally worked up, and nearly shout some of the time. He inserts lots of "y'see" and "see what I mean?" phrases, and frequently he will say something that he thinks should arouse indignation and then he will let out a sharp breath like people do when they're mildly outraged, to suggest that you should be outraged too. These feel like high-pressure tactics and as a result they actually make me inclined to look for reasons to reject his message. As for the content, sometimes the explanations/justifications strike me as a little simplistic with their reliance on "principles" and "paradigm shifts," but, despite all these criticisms, there is still a lot of good, concrete advice and many persuasive illustrations of his ideas, and I will probably want to look for a 'cliff notes' version to refer back to in the future.
Social: I've been seeing a lot of