09.29.09
Some of the Things
Truly, I am barely here. This place is still here, for some reason, and in the spirit of nothing-much-at-all, I'm posting this very thing in this very place.
On? We need new prepositions.
I'm planning to do NaNoWriMo again this year. (I have a bit of an existentational disenfranchisement going on, focused primarily around my growing disenchantment with my "career". I work 4 days a week from my home, and some days it's all I can do to do any work at all. This ebbs and flows - depends on how much work is being sent my way. I'm bored just writing three sentences about how bored with it all I am.) Writing a draft of another book will probably do nothing for any of this -- could in fact further distract me from what I'm supposed to be doing -- but it could possibly force me to focus myself a little bit more in general, thus sort of letting the rest of the unstructured stuff sort of crystallize around it.
Family life is great, stressful, hectic. My daughter is 3 months shy of being 3, and my son is 9 months old, large, working on crawling, and babbling. They're both incredible.
My addiction to Steelers football, and the NFL in general, has increased again this year. I bought a 46" Sony Bravia sometime during the off-season, having sold my only remaining electric guitar (a PRS of some description) to my boss' son. It's great watching the Steelers on it, except for the fact that they keep losing. This season they're some horrible mirror image of last: in the 2008 season they consistently looked like they were going to lose games but then pulled them out in the last quarter; this year the opener was like that, but then against the Bears and then the Bengals they became the bizarro Steelers, starting off with a bang and then just fizzling into crap.
I've been on a diet for a little while now, maybe a couple of months. I went in for a check up with a new doctor, having not had one since before starting my family, and was told I was in dangerous high blood pressure territory, and that I weighed 245 pounds. I was shocked more by the weight than anything; I've been thinking of myself as weighing about 225 for years now, and even at that I was significantly overweight. So since then I've been trying to eat better; started off counting calories but have slipped a little into just a more ambiguous don't-pig-out-all-the-time thing. And I started running 4 or so times a week. I've lost not quite 20 pounds (by my scale I started at 240 and am down around 221 now), and am trying to keep motivated enough to get down to 200 eventually. 220 is the weight I've always had listed on my driver's license, so that's a first step I'd really like to hit ASAP.
The running has been hard on my shins. At the start it was really tough on everything, but a week or so in I was feeling pretty good and enjoying it. Another couple of weeks later and my shins were starting to sort of chronically hurt. My jogging route is basically a mile up here on our mountain, involving a lot of up-and-down stuff. I do it in about 12 minutes, and I have lately been increasing the distance (which just involves doubling parts of the route). It's not a big run, but the hills add to the workout and the time it takes fits well in a lunch-break sort of scenario. Due to the pain in my shins, this week I decided to get my bike in shape enough to ride around up here on our mountain. My first ride, yesterday, was just about a mile and a half of looping around up here, which is hardly anything on a bike, though it was enough to remind me that the leg muscles involved in biking and running are really not the same. For today's ride I went all the way down the mountain, took some pictures in the industrial park down there, and then came back up. It's a strange situation for riding; pretty much the entire beginning is all downhill, taking a few roads that wind down to the bottom, then there's however much basically flat road I choose to follow, then it's all back up a number of steep roads. Feels backwards, as it's hard to enjoy the downhill knowing the uphill's going to follow.
But even though I hadn't even touched the bike since a few rides a year or more ago, I was able to make the trip back up without any huge destruction of self. So the running has definitely improved my conditioning somewhat. I plan on continuing with biking (though fitting it in is going to be difficult; today's ride was just about exactly 30 minutes.) I assume because of the timing issue I should just keep going down and up the hill, as even though it's not really that pleasurable (currently,) it IS a good way to condition myself in a short time.
If I keep motivated to continue posting here to nobody some photos may follow.
On? We need new prepositions.
I'm planning to do NaNoWriMo again this year. (I have a bit of an existentational disenfranchisement going on, focused primarily around my growing disenchantment with my "career". I work 4 days a week from my home, and some days it's all I can do to do any work at all. This ebbs and flows - depends on how much work is being sent my way. I'm bored just writing three sentences about how bored with it all I am.) Writing a draft of another book will probably do nothing for any of this -- could in fact further distract me from what I'm supposed to be doing -- but it could possibly force me to focus myself a little bit more in general, thus sort of letting the rest of the unstructured stuff sort of crystallize around it.
Family life is great, stressful, hectic. My daughter is 3 months shy of being 3, and my son is 9 months old, large, working on crawling, and babbling. They're both incredible.
My addiction to Steelers football, and the NFL in general, has increased again this year. I bought a 46" Sony Bravia sometime during the off-season, having sold my only remaining electric guitar (a PRS of some description) to my boss' son. It's great watching the Steelers on it, except for the fact that they keep losing. This season they're some horrible mirror image of last: in the 2008 season they consistently looked like they were going to lose games but then pulled them out in the last quarter; this year the opener was like that, but then against the Bears and then the Bengals they became the bizarro Steelers, starting off with a bang and then just fizzling into crap.
I've been on a diet for a little while now, maybe a couple of months. I went in for a check up with a new doctor, having not had one since before starting my family, and was told I was in dangerous high blood pressure territory, and that I weighed 245 pounds. I was shocked more by the weight than anything; I've been thinking of myself as weighing about 225 for years now, and even at that I was significantly overweight. So since then I've been trying to eat better; started off counting calories but have slipped a little into just a more ambiguous don't-pig-out-all-the-time thing. And I started running 4 or so times a week. I've lost not quite 20 pounds (by my scale I started at 240 and am down around 221 now), and am trying to keep motivated enough to get down to 200 eventually. 220 is the weight I've always had listed on my driver's license, so that's a first step I'd really like to hit ASAP.
The running has been hard on my shins. At the start it was really tough on everything, but a week or so in I was feeling pretty good and enjoying it. Another couple of weeks later and my shins were starting to sort of chronically hurt. My jogging route is basically a mile up here on our mountain, involving a lot of up-and-down stuff. I do it in about 12 minutes, and I have lately been increasing the distance (which just involves doubling parts of the route). It's not a big run, but the hills add to the workout and the time it takes fits well in a lunch-break sort of scenario. Due to the pain in my shins, this week I decided to get my bike in shape enough to ride around up here on our mountain. My first ride, yesterday, was just about a mile and a half of looping around up here, which is hardly anything on a bike, though it was enough to remind me that the leg muscles involved in biking and running are really not the same. For today's ride I went all the way down the mountain, took some pictures in the industrial park down there, and then came back up. It's a strange situation for riding; pretty much the entire beginning is all downhill, taking a few roads that wind down to the bottom, then there's however much basically flat road I choose to follow, then it's all back up a number of steep roads. Feels backwards, as it's hard to enjoy the downhill knowing the uphill's going to follow.
But even though I hadn't even touched the bike since a few rides a year or more ago, I was able to make the trip back up without any huge destruction of self. So the running has definitely improved my conditioning somewhat. I plan on continuing with biking (though fitting it in is going to be difficult; today's ride was just about exactly 30 minutes.) I assume because of the timing issue I should just keep going down and up the hill, as even though it's not really that pleasurable (currently,) it IS a good way to condition myself in a short time.
If I keep motivated to continue posting here to nobody some photos may follow.
abbotofunreason wrote: