Beginning

Tonight feels like sort of a wash so I'm going to write this introductory entry to attempt to salvage something from my evening. 

I got home, after stopping by J's to pick up my yoga mat, bike gear, and bicycle and cooked dinner. I made a soup that I like with red lentil and swiss chard. It didn't come out as good as it typically does. :-/  The soup also took forever. I don't remember waiting around that much previously. Result: soso okay soup that I'll be eating for days and sapping all time and energy that was supposed to also be spent on a short run... 

...Nation's Tri is 5 days away. I don't know how prepared I feel for this race. I know I can finish. I also know that parts of it are going to hurt. So I'm left to think about goals. My goals for the race? Finish feeling good enough that training for next year sounds exciting. I am going to need something to keep my going, something I'm going to have to discover. 

I suppose the real reason I am beginning to keep this is to remind myself to find better ways of doing things. Primarily I'm setting a goal for myself. In 2 days I'll have my 28th birthday. My gift to myself is to live, completely, within my means. This means no credit that is not paid off in it's entirety that month. Historically, I've not been good at doing this. I've never carried vast amounts of debt, but I've seen the way it builds and grows. 

I'm taking control. 9/9 will be D-day for any debt. Pending some huge crisis I will have a year of zero debt. Might that mean I can't buy plane tickets right away when the mood strikes? Yes. Will it mean that I won't be taking a stained glass class? Yes. (at least for this fall). Maybe I can end up doing those things, they are just going to take a little more planning. I can plan. I can plan the shit out of things. I don't know how to predict the future, so I think that may make this a neat experiment.