Flying Northwest … bit of a crap shoot whether or not I’ll make it home reasonably on time.

I downloaded a whole bunch of beta software from http://ideas.live.com last night (9/14), including Live Writer, an offline blog editor. Have to say – it’s very pleasant to be able to write when I’m disconnected. That’s when I most want to write!

What have a learned this week? Well, I am trying to do a bit more than I am physically capable of doing. There are some positives …

For one, I’m starting to practice my violin again – turns out it’s not such a big deal to travel with it after all. Only negative is that I have to check luggage, but I can cope with that. Now, I’m no where close to being back in the rhythm of practicing – I’d like to get there, but it’s going to take a while. I guess right now, I’m in a stage where I’m carrying my violin around a lot – at least I’m reminded that I want to play, but I’m not actually setting up my life to remember to play every day, yet.

Similar deal with running – I’m still running but not quite as much as I would like. I’d really like to run 15-20 miles per week, and right now, I’m probably getting in 5-8 miles. I need to simplify some other aspects of my life to get that in.

And then there’s work. I had a good work week, but there are still so many to-do items that I didn’t get to. Something’s gotta give. I have to simplify things somehow.

I see two opportunities – one is simply quitting caffeine again. I allowed myself to start drinking coffee a few weeks ago, and it’s just diminishing returns for me. I have to get my sleep in, so caffeine isn’t going to allow me to get in a longer day. It ends up just making higher highs and lower lows. I don’t like it. Gotta get off it again. Simple.

The second thing is Internet browsing. I watch very little TV, but I haven’t really paid attention to how much time I spend following threads online. This is part of what I get paid for (researching technology), but if I look at the time I spend each day/evening, I lose more personal time to browsing than I would like. Gotta cut that down.

All of this is part of trying to get more of a rhythm to my life. My life is complicated, and I don’t necessarily want that to change. But if I am to find some kind of peace within my complicated life, then I need to find a rhythm, get used to the craziness, feel "right" about whatever I am doing at any given moment.

Lots of work to do.