Two outta three

Not a bad average if you're a Major League baseball player. Maybe a little less great for life.

While taking a break from writing today, I scrolled through some old blog entries. I came across my goals for 2017. I didn't expect to hit them all, but I'd have to say I came up a bit short.

Nailed it:

• Passed the qualifying exam
• 4.0 GPA (that one's pretty much locked in now since I'm done with coursework)
• Converted all initiatives at work to scalable platform (2200 billable hours to make that happen; might be the reason I failed some of the others)
• Still married
• Still debt free (though my credit card got hacked 5 times!)
• Supported Yaya's music

Not so much:

• Didn't even take, much less pass, the admission to candidacy. That stings a bit. There was a time I thought a PhD in 2018 might be possible. Now, 2019 is starting to look optimistic. Holding life together for two more years with this schedule will not be easy.
• No papers accepted for publication. I'm downright despondent over this one.
• No buckle from Leadville (not even the small one). Mountain ultras just don't seem to be my thing. That won't stop me from doing them, though.

So, what are we hoping for this year?

Well, for starters, if I don't get a paper published this year and through the A exam, it's game over. I can't do this work/school thing forever. I might even put a shorter fuse on that. It really needs to happen this spring.

I don't really have any big goals at work. There's plenty to do, but nothing like last years highly-visible milestones. Maybe I can get my hours down to around 1800. Four hundred extra hours at school would make a pretty big difference.

I'd leave the family goals the same as last year. We've got the normal teenage crap to deal with and a few not so normal challenges, but generally the status quo is fine.

It's a bit hard to think about running goals when I've been injured for the last six weeks. Just getting back to running healthy seems like it would be a super great thing right now. That said, I'm running US100 champs next weekend and a World Major marathon in the fall, so I can't pretend I don't care at all.