Overtly and consciously preoccupied with keeping busy today.  Started early with some work from Herkimer Coffee in the U-District, followed by a coffee meetup with someone with whom I run in the same circles online, but who I had never met in person.  Hello William Carleton, Esq.!  Great to finally get to know you IRL and trade blogging tips and tricks.  If you are a startup junky like me, you’ll enjoy Bill’s stuff at http://www.wac6.com/, and he’s syndicated on Seattle 2.0 and BigStartups as well (and a couple other places too, I think).  Nice guy.  Good writer.  Good at his job.  All in all, a great guy to get to know.

Next: a phone call re: side project, which is in that last-minute get-some-stuff-out-the-door phase – a normal coordination/tension/communication funhouse, nothing unusual.  It’s actually sort of fun to work in a completely virtual environment now and then.

Keeping busy…

Appointments, the second of which was with my new eye doctor, who looks and acts sort of like a cross between John Goodman and … another actor whose face and voice I can totally envision, but whose name (and roles) escape me for the moment.  He tells me I have a scar on each cornea.  I’m thinking to myself as he tells me this, “In the grand scheme of things, given everything that’s going on right now, a scar on my cornea is really about as insignificant as a grain of sand in the desert.”  But I suppose I should take his advice and swap out my contacts more often.  I go back in a few weeks for a fitting.

Picked up a check, which is always nice, especially considering the source.  Deposited it.  Thought like a VC and wished it were for 10X.

Went to the gym and busted my ass on the treadmill.  This is my last hard workout before this weekend’s 5K, and I ran HARD.  I did intervals, and ran as fast on the treadmill as I think I ever have. To put this in context, though, consider I didn’t start running on treadmills until after college.  I think I could pull a 6:30 or 7-minute mile right now, but for the 5K I’m shooting for a 9 minute per mile pace.  If I get that, I’ll be happy.  It’s a baseline, and the point is to get a time under my belt that I can improve upon.  I’m already thinking about signing up for the Jingle Bell Run next month.

Got blown off for a conference call with a new business acquaintance, which almost never happens anymore.  I think this is because your reputation for things like reliability, promptness, follow-through are all so exposed in this new online era.  Perhaps this person got hit by a bus.  I don’t know.  For the record: I hope he didn’t get hit by a bus.  I’m just saying it was strange.

Back to Starbucks to work (keeping busy!) and to blog a bit, and consider an upcoming change of venue on Friday that is being imposed/offered/granted/thrust upon me.  It is what it is, and I am going to try to take the attitude of making lemonade out of it, despite all sorts of complicated feelings I have about the subject.  What can one do, but do one’s best?  Exactly.

Friday I’m back to work at my normal job, and it should be a fairly relaxed day.  I know my team has kept things humming along during my absence this week.

This weekend will be a period of huge adjustment for me and I hope to get through it mostly whole and mostly unscathed and mostly happy.  Of course by Sunday I’ll have written six additional blog posts.  Speaking of blogging – someone close to me told me that my blog was “weird” and that if they were just getting to know me, they would think I was weird too.  I wonder, dear reader, if you feel the same way?  Or is that an opinion shared only by those who don’t spend a lot of time online?  Is the near-real-time, overly-exposed side of me that appears in this blog a refreshing bit of authenticity, or is it (to borrow a formerly trendy term) an overshare?  Curious to hear what others think.