Impossible List - 15 October

How far I've come over the course of the last month in regards to the impossible list of goals I've set for myself.

Professional

I'm still not feeling a focus in my life. Not sure I'm going to find it without making a large change to something and I don't think I want to do that. I'll just carry on in my antics and see what happens. In other news I've entered the Scottish Backgammon Open.

Health / Fitness

After a few weeks after a failed Ochil Ultra 50 I'm back into ultra training for next years Ultra Scotland 100. The training will be harder, but I'm hoping that pushing myself to move further faster will help me make cut off times and build the slack needed for my slow down in the later stages of racing. I'm also hoping to start running the hills that I climb every month, hopefully that will help building the power behind my running engine.I am also looking to loose weight and to that end I've given up fizzy juice. I started 1 October and I'm still going strong. When I get to November I am hoping to switch over to counting calories and hoping that I can cut my weight down to improve my running.

Personal Skills

I've been focusing effort on building up my blog with supporting log pages for travel and photos beyond my initial runlog. I've also jumped into working on a DigDug clone.

Flickr has been abandoned in favour of my own photo log connected to my blog. I'll close the account later this year.

Travel / Events

Malta has been planned and schedule in for November to finish renouncing my citizenship. Emily's coming along, should be fun.Next year I am still planning to go and spend some time with my Dad, don't know when yet, but that's the only solid plan for next year. Looking at going to Ireland with Louise to see Sean and his wife as well as possibly a trip to Chamonix.

Volunteering / Charity

We continue to out perform our budget and last years numbers. This will go a long ways towards making up for our last two years of financial performance. Digital sales have been very helpful. I'm still working on getting the basics set in place for Tayside Re-Users and that is moving along nicely. Our trustee numbers have been a concern lately, but over the last month this has become critical, as of the end of October we will be down to 3 trustees. But in our efforts to recruit more we've had at least two people sign up, so perhaps we will be OK after all.

Education / Languages

I've been reading a lot, but no focused education has really been looked at lately. Still need to win the lottery to give this too much more focus. I am hoping to read 36 books this year, I'm currently 24 books in.

Financial

Just working hard in my role as Staff Engineer and trying to sort out my shop and put everything into a good status. We are moving forward, but this might take years. I am also starting to look outside Insights a bit and start to plan what my next career steps my take. I think I'm going to run into a wall and I need to pick my battles a bit more carefully. One of the key issues holding me back is a lack of people management experience recently in my career. I have also, mostly non-seriously, looked at taking a course in management put on by the Chartered Management Institute.