Goals

Meditation Seed

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A friend returned to work today after taking a 10-day meditation retreat at nearby Dhamma Mahavana in North Fork, CA still reeling from everything that she had experienced there… and I don’t necessarily mean in a good way. Her description of what she went through pretty much terrified me. Correct that, terrifies me. Present tense. … Read more

Fitness Month

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I had one of those realistic, vivid dreams a few days ago, that leave you wondering if the thing in the dream really happened or not. In the dream, I was trying on jeans, which I hate doing anyway because nothing convinces me that I’m a completely abnormal shape than trying on pants, even when I’m fit. In the dream, when I looked in the mirror, I realized that I had a huge balloon butt. I mean, giant, where did this come from and why haven’t I noticed it before, booty. Naturally, in the dream, the pants didn’t fit.

When I woke up the next morning, I realized that, yes, indeed, it was long past time to get back in shape. I tried this last October, and then promptly injured my shoulder by crashing my bike when I took a corner too fast. When that injury healed, I got taken out by a wobbly kid on a bike who swerved into me, and injured myself again. All that is finally (knock on wood) in the past, and I’m having dreams of being fat. Tom has put a moratorium on stupid minor injuries (and major ones too), and I’m ready to go.

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NaNoWriMo musings

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I finished! During the month of November, I and more than 32,000 other people around the world each completed 50,000 words of fiction. This was just over 19% of the people who signed up. Collectively, according to the NaNoWriMo stats, the word count of everyone who participated and uploaded their writings to the NaNo web … Read more

NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month

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There. I did it. I pushed the little sign up button on the NaNoWriMo page and now I’m basically committed to writing a 50,000 word novel next month. Hoo boy. Part of me is really excited about the challenge, and another part is wondering what the hell the first part is thinking. First of all, … Read more

Progress Check

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So far we’re 29 days into Lent, and I’ve managed to get a blog post in each day. I’ve missed a few days, and had to back-date, but I’m still at one-for-one, and I usually get that nagging lagging post in the next morning.

It’s a lot more writing than I’ve really ever done before, and the great thing about it is that it seems to be getting easier with each day that goes by. Ideas for things to write about come at me faster than I can get them down. (Knock on wood that it continues.) The conservative part of me is saving those posts for use on later days when I can’t think of something else to say, or don’t have time to get something down, but the longer this goes on, the easier it is for me to build up a surplus of ideas.

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Leaning In or Leaning Back

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Seth Godin is my marketing hero. The author of a dozen or so books, including “The Dip” and “All Marketers are Liars”, Seth’s books and blog have been a constant source of insight and perspective since I first started looking into his stuff. One of the concepts I picked up out of the many ideas in his book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, was this idea of leaning in or leaning back. It’s not even one of the big ideas in that book, but you never know where you’ll find something you can use.

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Playing the piano like Tom Bopp

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Tom Bopp played the piano for the retirement party last night, and getting to see him in action made me think a lot about playing the piano and the power of music. I’d love to be able to play like Tom.

I started learning to play classical piano when I was 5 or 6 years old, and took lessons all the way through high-school. But, I had stopped playing since then, until Tom put his foot down and bought a piano for me about 8 months ago.

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