We just crossed month number two of the year, so here’s another pulse check on how I’m tracking against some personal goals for 2019. I’m tracking on all fronts, slightly better positioned against the pace marks than I was at the end of January.

With meditation practice I’ve widened my plus gap more than last month through some longer sessions. Experimenting with longer 15 or 20 minute sessions has been positive, but I don’t want to push that too far and demotivate the daily routine. I’m also still working out how to best fit that practice into my schedule in a consistent way — inconsistency in the timing (sometimes morning, sometimes night) makes it challenging to do longer sessions.

I came out ahead on the running this month. Not losing a week to illness like I did in January certainly helped, but I was able to do a week-long trip out west without disrupting the routine too much. One thing I’ve fallen into over the last couple weeks is fewer, longer runs rather than frequent, shorter ones. It’s been okay for the most part, but I could see that irregularity breaking up the pacing too much, so I need to do better about an “every other day” general goal. Having 2 or sometimes 3 full days off in there requires 10K+ distances to be able to keep on pace (Bill actually wrote on this topic recently, also). Every so often I have an evening where I go out with an intent to do 3.5 to 4 miles, but end up stretching to 6 just because I feel good. It’s fine for that to happen occasionally, but I don’t want to risk injury. Yesterday I did a 3.5-miler with a half-numb mouth (I had just gotten a filling at the dentist less than an hour before), so that was interesting. But I kept on pace!

There were a couple of great books in my reads for the month. In particular John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country is one I’m looking forward to writing about soon.

I haven’t had much time lately to spend on my cartography projects, but that should change in the next couple of months. I’m still rolling with the daily writing routine. There’s no sign of a shortage of topics to write about. I thought this would be much more challenging than it is, but I guess (like any habit) the key is routine. I tend to write longer-form things in spurts where I’ll add to 3 or 4 posts in one sitting so I gradually can build a backlog of content. Post ideas come to me at all times of day, so having a ubiquitous capture method to always log those somewhere is helpful to keep track. Making the time for writing each evening definitely takes commitment. Getting a bunch of it done while I’m “in the zone” helps to lighten the load on other days where I don’t have the mental bandwidth to write very much. For example, on a long flight a few weeks back I wrote about 3 or 4 posts in one sitting.

In other personal news, we’re under contract for a new house in Shore Acres, which is exciting. Will post more here as that develops!

On to March. We’ve got a visit to Jacksonville, Elyse’s spring break, Disney on Ice, and some other fun things planned.