inauspicio.us

I haven’t written in a while, because I’m trolling for work again. Updating my resume on monster.com, calling companies I’ve worked for in the past, dealing with a few of the hundreds of recruiter-spams I get each day, it can be a bit draining.

My favorite is updating my resume on Monster though. They have a pretty detailed interface, so recruiters can see and download your latest resume, see when it was uploaded, et cetera. So it baffles me that close to one hundred percent of the many emails I receive contain the following, practically verbatim:

Dear Will Ronco,
I saw your resume on Monster.com. I think you may be a good fit for a (DBA/Analyst/CIO/Sales/Developer) position we have available. Please send me your resume.
Sincerely yours,
Yet Another Recruiter

I’ve highlighted the relevant parts. How much work experience do you think I have gained in the last 24 hours? I am going to start sending these people my racing resume. “Oh yeah, all that Oracle DBA stuff and multithreaded development in C# … yeah, that was my old resume. I do triathlons now. Same hourly rate.”

Well it’s my second to last night in Colorado Springs for a few months and a bittersweet time.  I brought Steph to the airport this morning – she’s off to Greece for three weeks – and came home to the large pile of packing still to do.  Ugh.

So here’s what’s going on in the meantime: I’m going to Boston to visit my family on Thursday.  This weekend is my old church’s 25th annual retreat, and my 25th time attending.  Not that I’m the posterchild for maintaining your roots, but for whatever reason there are some things in life that I don’t feel like giving up even for a little while.  Also I get all nostalgic and weepy when Steph is not around.  She has been gone for eleven hours now, hmm, yes, check back with me in a week or two.

The other thing that I’m doing this weekend is testing my fitness at two races.  Then I’ll have two weeks to chill out in Boston, visiting my family and training a lot, before I deliver myself for a summary ass-kicking very competitive race in Maryland.

Then back to Colorado.  Steph and I will be in Boulder all summer, and I will be staying through the fall to do my buildup for Ironman Florida.  I planned to race there in ’05 and ’06 as well, but circumstances prevented me from actually doing it.  So this year I’m Making The Commitment, so to speak, and I’m going to hole up in boulder all through the fall and train like a madman.  Which is probably exactly what I will be.

This whole plan just begs for a little elaboration … which I will maybe get to, after I pack 500 more boxes.

Sniff.

Haven’t written in a while because I am a big self-pitying lump. It turns out that staying positive ( sorry, Staying Positive, it’s not just a proper noun it’s a book title ) is just about as hard as any other thing you might try to get better at. Ugh! All these things to practice! It would be nice to have something that wasn’t so goal-driven to do. I do know that stayin Staying Positive is not really something you’re supposed to try to be good at, and that in fact like many head-things it’s counterproductive to try really hard to be good at it. But at the same time, how do you improve except by trying? It’s a true conundrum.

I think that I might, finally, after many months, have begun to get the unnaturally-fragile-health thing under control. I have ne drugs to keep my asthma and allergies (allergies! who knew?) under better control. Also strict, explicit instructions to use one of those god-awful sinus washers as often as possible. So I may not stay healthy but darn it if they ever have a contest to see whose nostrils are the cleanest I am going to WIN, baby!

So I am back in to bread and butter training this week, feeling more or less good and cautiously optimistic about my chances of staying healthy for the foreseeable future.