Talk to me so you can see, oh, what's going on...

"Hello... [tap tap tap] ... is this thing on?"

It's been a weird month or so.  For a while I felt very fragmented and unfocused, largely because of depression cycle that I went through.  But I powered through it and it passed, followed by a period of great clarity.

was 

Like Thorough at Walden Pond, I'm trying to live deliberately.  Which is great, in terms of my desire to focus on my goals and tackle them, and in particular build my coaching business.

But kind of boring in terms of any interesting resulting blog posts.  I go through periods when every little thing that happens to me brings to mind a funny (I hope) or engaging way to tell a funny story in this space I'm occupying here.  But right now is not one of those periods.  

I did have a kickass ski day up at Copper Mountain last Friday.  I was 10 minutes away from the mountain when I realized I had forgotten my ski boots.  

"Fuck it, I guess I'm renting today."

Then I thought about the fact that my skis are 8 or 9 years old -- dinosaurs, in terms of the advances that have been made in ski design and technology lately.  "Hell, if I'm going to rent, I might as well demo some new skis and see what all the fuss is about."

So the nice young hippie working at the ski shop fitted me out in a pair of brand new K2 Superburnins.  And I proceeded to have the time of my life, while realizing what the fuss is indeed all about.

It's about precision and control.  

I am a good athlete, and I am a decent skier, particularly given that I didn't learn how to do it until I was 28.  And what I really like to do is go really fast down steep inclines.  But I've always felt that notwithstanding my willingness to let myself fall down the mountain the way I do, I haven't been exactly safe -- I've had the sense of skirting a very fine line between fast, fun skiing and crashing horribly out of control.  

No longer.  On these skis, I was still really fast, but totally in control and carving turns in a way I've never been able to before.  It was a totally different skiing experience.

I obsessed about the skis all day Saturday, doing Google searches and finding last year's model (which is essentially the same ski) for sale at a number of different places.  Including one retailer in Seattle that was having a close-out on the skis in my size, which I guess isn't that popular a seller because I'm such a shrimp.  What started out as a $850 pair of skis was eventually marked down to $370, by the time they took all the discounts at checkout.

So I bought them.  

And was able to afford them because of my new-found focus on building my coaching business.  I'm really, really determined to grow it to the point that in two years, I will be able to pay off all debts, fix up my million-year-old house, and no longer have to work full time if I don't want to.  I've signed a bunch of new coaches recently and am very excited about helping them build *their* businesses so they can achieve their goals as well.  It's pretty cool.  And it's working - every month I earn more than the previous month, so I'm chipping away at my target, bit by bit.

You can read more about it here.

So that's what's going on with me lately.