Lots of confusion out there over the exact meaning of the adjective “black” in the phrase “Black Friday” – some take it to mean dark, angry, depressing, as in the supposed mood of thousands of foul-tempered shoppers, fighting over the last Oakland Raiders XL fleece jacket at the Crenshaw Wal-Mart.  In  actuality it means “profitable”, as in the phrase “in the black”, so it’s intended to carry good connotations.

Yet another example of language that can suggest different things to different people, which I need to keep in mind for Crowdify.  I may have to write a blog post about this on my Crowdify blog, which would mean I would need to get that blog working again after many months of disuse.  Which would mean I’d need to dust off my Perl/MYSQL skills (shakes fist at WordPress).  Which would mean I’d need to find the motivation…endless backwards branching from the leaf, to the twig, to the branch, to the trunk, to the root, to the earth itself.  Is nothing easy anymore?

Tomorrow I race in my first 5K in many years.  To prepare, I slept 11 hours.  Well, let’s just say that was the excuse.   I had briefly considered going to the gym this morning for a light workout but, hm, felt disinclined to do so for a variety of reasons.  Instead I stayed in bed a while longer and let my mind race over everything I have coming up, which is a lot – and yet also a just a little, when you tilt your head and look at it in just the right way.  Which way to perceive it?  That, my friends, is the endless struggle.  How to look at our lives and decide how to interpret circumstances.

I’ve been reading Martin Heidegger recently, and on the one hand it’s nice to get lost in philosophy, but on the other hand he’s a real bear, syntactically speaking.  The book is “Poetry, Language, Thought” (he disdains the and that one might reasonably put in the title) and it has some gems about truth and beauty and origin and connectedness, so I’ll keep reading.  I may pick up an old book I have called “The Enlightenment Reader” next, which I first read years ago, but which is probably due for a re-read.

What else?  Saw a request put out for volunteers to do a stair-climb challenge next week and offered up my name.  That sounds fun, and I can climb stairs better than anyone else my size I know so we’ll see.  It may be too late – the team may be full – and it looks like I may not know until Monday, what with all the people taking the day off today.

Feeling a little soggy right now, but with a supreme sense of confidence.  I just finished eleven reps on the Blaine Street staircase, which equals 3,223 stairs.  This is a new PR for me.  The rain came pouring down on me during the middle of the seventh rep but I kept on going.  To be honest, I had a micro-moment of indecision, but that was the old Anthony talking, not the new Anthony that sees the goal and goes for it and keeps on going and doesn’t stop.  I like this newly-discovered sense of motivation and commitment.  It fits.

I didn’t need to stop at eleven.  I have more in my gas tank as I sit and write this.  At some level, I’m fit enough that I could go all morning (ed: that’s what SHE said!).  But I like the idea of slow, incremental, injury-free progress.  Next week I’ll go for twelve.  And then thirteen.  And so on.

Yesterday I had a doctor’s appointment out in Bellevue and afterwards went down and visited my Dad at the Tahoma National Cemetery – “Where Heroes Rest".  I have a lot going on right now and Dad was always the one person I could talk to about anything.  It felt really good just to go hang out for a short bit, reminisce about the good times we shared, think about all the ways in which you can see his personality and character in me, and wonder what he would say if we could actually talk to each other.  Dad was always quiet – not much of a flapjaw – but somehow, after we’d gotten done visiting, I would always seem to feel better and more clear-headed about this or that other thing that was bugging me.

I spent the evening last night at a Starbucks working on some architectural diagrams, and felt fairly productive.  This is all greenfield stuff and so it’s clean and proper and unsullied – that is, until the first line of code is written.   Which may not be until January, if ever.  Regardless, it’s a useful exercise because if and when the demand hits, it’s going to hit hard, and we’d better make sure we have the broad strokes of a solution outlined so we don’t build a Yugo when the customers want a Ferrari.

Not sure what’s on the plate for the weekend.  I may go see another movie: the Coen Brothers have a new one, A Serious Man, that’s getting good reviews.  It’s got an 86% score on the Tomatometer, for example.  The kids have a soccer game tomorrow at noon.  I will obviously work a bit here and there – I want to really figure out LINQ expression trees at some point soon.

Off to work.  Both of my developers are out today so I’m holding down the fort.  I’m going to tear shit up and put it all back together before they get back on Monday.   They won’t even know what happened.

I just got done with seven reps on the 293-step Blaine Street Staircase on Capitol Hill.  That’s a new PR for me by one.  Each week I’ve been able to pull one more rep out of my a**, so next week I’ll be expecting to nail eight reps.  OW.

That moody perplexity that hit me earlier this week came back with a repeat performance yesterday.  Different causes; same effect.  I tried to wash it away with a hard bike ride to no avail.  Lucky me though, I ran into a new friend at the coffee shop last night who also had had just a so-so day and so was able to commiserate with her for a few minutes.  She’s got this great concept called a “perspective shelf” on which she places items as a reminder that, when things are not looking so hot, there are other people that have it much worse.  It helps her keep daily woes in perspective.  I might try something like that.  Journaling has helped, but it’s not like that’s a visible thing that I can look at all the time.  In fact, given the contents, the more hidden my journal is, the less anxious I am.

I blogged a couple days ago about how I haven’t been doing as much tech/entrepreneurial blogging lately.  At work I attended a couple backgrounders this week on Cloud Computing and Windows Azure and it’s sort of re-whetted my appetite for experimentation and exploration.  So expect to see some more posts on those topics, and related topics, in the weeks and months to come.

Am I a prolific blogger?  If you look at the Seattle 2.0 Blog Index, I’m way up there in terms of the number of posts per month.  I like to post a lot.  I’ve got a lot to say, I like to write, and posting frequently keeps me on my toes – I have to remain fresh, interested, and engaged to find items to write about.  The last few months I’ve been doing a lot of sob-story navel-gazing but I’d like to break out of that trend – at least for a while.

The kids’ second soccer game of the season is tomorrow at 1 PM.  Will I be flying solo again?  Not sure.  The kids are excited, that’s for certain.  The rest of the weekend I’ll be doing work on that new project I (cough) “volunteered” for.  With a hard deadline of 11:59 PM Sunday night, I may not be getting a lot of sleep this weekend.

Anybody up for some coworking?  Have laptop, will travel.  Let me know your neighborhood and preferred coffee shop and I’ll meet you.

Off to work.  I really really really hope that today doesn’t deliver any sad, anxious, frustrating, or rueful circumstances.  Wish me luck.

So yesterday I wrote about my hour-long workout on the rowing machine at the gym.  Last night, I could already seem them appearing – two huge blisters, one on the middle finger of each hand.  I’d take a picture but they don’t show up so great on my iPhone.  That’s what I get for trying to be a masochist!  My neck, back, and arms are all VERY aware of a big workout, however, so it was a useful sixty minutes.

The strangest thing happened to me this morning.  I walked into the bathroom, shirt off, and I did a double-take.  I’m getting skinny and I’m still not used to this new body that I see in the mirror.  I actually saw an abdominal muscle, believe it or not.  Yes, you can scoff: Anthony’s abs are showing?  But I tell you it’s true.  Well, ONE ab is showing.  I have five more to uncover to get to a six-pack.  If my plan to go to the work Halloween party costumed in a toga ends up coming to pass, I’ll have all sorts of newly-muscled features poking out.  Or so I hope.

This morning was Day 59 of my streak, and I spent the pre-dawn hour running stairs near my house.  It was kind of cool to be out exercising before the sun was even up.  From the top of the stairs one can see all the way to the Cascades; the purple glimmer of the dawn was just sending out its first hints of light; and I was feeling pretty good about myself.

Day 60 – another big milestone – is tomorrow.  If it’s not going to rain too hard I’ll probably bike in to work.  Wish me luck!