Renovation: population me.

So the house closed, and we are moved in. I traded my old gig for a new one that pays half again as much. I have very consistent work hours now even though they are 9 to 6, I get home right around 7 every night. Unfortunately those nights have been taken over by the renovation of the house. I painted and laid flooring in the three bedrooms. Then I painted our mud room. I am now working on the entry/foyer. The room has lower paneling and had wallpaper on the top half of the room. Kathy and I stripped the wallpaper to find what I can only describe as a travesty of wall preparation. The room had a layer of latex which had been haphazardly slapped on, not covering the entirety of the wall surface, right over the paper covering of the gypsum board. Taking off the wallpaper meant taking off the paper in several spots. We ended up with the realization that we need to skim-coat the entry. First, though, we would have to remove all of the wallpaper glue. This meant soaking down the wall and scraping the glue off with a spackling knife. I count it as one of the worst jobs I have ever had the misfortune of having to do. The more depressing part is that I had to do it all over again in the dining room. With the entry now coated and needing only to be sanded before painting and with only 6 feet left to wash and scrape in the dining room, I am confident we will have both rooms ready within the week. This is especially important because we have visitors arriving on Wednesday my sister is visiting

Holding one's breath

There has been a long silence coming from me on a variety of subjects. I will quickly fill you in because I am short on time.

The job: Not liking it. Can't quit it.
The house: not closed yet
The weight: I'm down about another 5 pounds
Certifications: I have a study guide for the IC3 exam and must take it before March 7th
Other news: No new work on chainmail or knives right now. I am still working on getting into the new house and workspace. But it looks as though I am getting anew XBox 360 for the new house.

Writing

I am fairly verbose. Okay, I am positively talkative, sometimes even chatty. So why am I not able to write at length? I have written a lot of things. I wrote two plays while I was in high school. I took writing for the theater in college and, from all indications was very good at it. So what happened in the last 17 years to make me decide that what I have to write isn't worth reading? Or is it even that? Have I been so obsessed with so many other things that writing has just taken a back seat to finding the next gig, the next lighting project, the next acting gig. The same could be said for my reading. I used to read voraciously. I would run through fiction like a banshee. I would read through reference books and memorize small facts to impress my friends.
I think that writing and reading are habits. Habits you can get into if you decide it is something that is important to you. Habits that require support of money and time, but the time is something you have to make. Something you have to carve out of your everyday life. It also means that you have to not do other things that also take up time. So I'm trying to get back into the habit. I have made reading a necessity for work. I have made writing a commitment for the year. I'm not sure how well this will go, but I am determined to make both back into habits and maintain them.

Oh, and I joined the Heart of Kentucky Men's chorus. I will be singing baritone.

Erasing my high scores

I am a huge fan of the Expresso Bike system and have said many times that it is my favorite video game. The concept is simple: take a stationary bike and attach it to a computer generated environment, then make it interactive. It is easily one of the most fun things you can do while trying to be active and staying in one place. The system remembers your last ride and saves it as a "ghost" which races you the next time you choose that map. This has been a great motivation for me every time I have climbed on the bike, but because of my aforementioned heartrate problem, I decided tonight to erase all of my fastest times and set up new times with my heartrate between 127 and 140bpm, which translates to 65 to 75% of my maximum heart rate. As far as I can tell my true maximum heartrate is right around 178 to 180 so I'm about right on there.

It was pretty disconcerting to watch "old me" zoom by and beat me by minutes on the maps. On the other hand, I was still well ahead of the pacer which the program gives you as a guide for how fast to go. It is still a reminder of how far out of shape I am and how far I need to go to get back to a reasonable fitness level.

I made it through 4 maps and I intend on clearing out all of the maps that I have run so far, and there are several. It will take me hours to get through them all. I will be starting fresh though and that is a good thing.

I also stopped by the assisted pull up machine and did 7 pull ups with the machine taking care of 150lbs of my weight. I still have a long way to go before I am doing one unassisted, but that is progress and I have all year to get myself up.

I finished out the evening by walking for 30 minutes on the treadmill. The treadmill, however, decided that it could help me out by having me install their app on my iphone so I could listen to music while walking. It's an interesting app, which says it will record my workouts, but I have not explored it in depth yet. no doubt there is more to come on that front.

I do realize that I am over 7 days since my last post, so keep an eye out dear reader for a second post before the end of the weekend. I can promise some blacksmithing updates.

TRX, Juicing and my heartrate problem

This week has been pretty crazy. I have been working massive amounts of overtime due to a Windows 7 deployment at work. Everything was going well until we found a problem with the testing procedures which delayed my getting home until 10 pm on Wednesday and found an issue with the compatibility of the latest model of CPU with our old receipt printer. What this really means is I did not get to the gym at all from Monday through Friday. On Saturday that all changed as I went to my first TRX class at the gym. TRX is an exercise system which uses body weight to provide resistance. It pretty much looks like a couple of pieces of webbing hanging from the ceiling with handles about a foot above the floor. I didn't realize the class was an hour long, so I went pretty hard for the first half hour, which meant I was pretty well spent for the second half hour. I got through it and ran to the store for almonds and rice puffs, which I was then craving.

There was no down time as the house inspector was already at the prospective new house with Kathy. I went straight to it and joined the process. The evaluation is enlightening, but the only piece of it that really makes a difference is the roof, which has been hit quite hard by hail. We are hoping the current owners' insurance will cover a replacement. The new house is not yet a foregone conclusion.

We did however, get a new juicer. This one is a masticating juicer, a distinct change from the centrifugal juicer we have been borrowing up to this point. The eventual plan is to attempt a week long juice fast, but willpower is a bit tricky when dealing with appetite. The machine is quite astounding as it will extrude pasta, grind nut butters as well as juice fruits and vegetables and it is much quieter than I thought it would be. This afternoon we tried mango, cucumber and cantaloupe, which was quite tasty. I hope we make it through a week even if we have to start by doing a day or two first.

Lastly I made it to the gym this evening to attempt something that I have not tried before. I spent a half hour on an elliptical machine, maintaining my heart rate at 127bpm. Usually I try to go as fast as possible and not worry about how high my heart rate goes. I was speaking with one of the owners of the gym and he told me that I should really try to not go to hard for to long as the body may stop using fat as fuel and use protein from muscles to fuel the activity. So today I decided to exercise for a half hour at roughly 70% of my maximum heart rate. I found out two very interesting things at the conclusion of it. One, I ran almost as far as I do when I am going full out.. Second, I burned nearly as many calories as when I go full out. Turns out pacing myself may be a boon for me.

New House

For those of you who have been wondering why I haven't posted any work yet, the reason is simple: I do not yet have a place to forge at. That will be changing now that Kathy and I have finally gotten an accepted offer on a house with a HUGE garage. The house has 1900 sq. ft. and Kathy has a series of ideas for the indoor spaces, but my focus will be getting a workspace set up for the forge and anvil. This is all contingent on the inspection of the house. Stay tuned dear reader, there will be metalwork aplenty to come. Of course this blog is meant to chronicle the progress of setting up the forge and all that comes after, so the joy will be in the journey, not the destination.

If at first you don't succeed...

Today I went about 500 calories above my allotted 1700 plus or minus. That is the bad news. The good news is that Kathy and I put an offer in on a house in Bardstown. To my friends in Alaska, you may have a place to hang out if you come down to visit. It also means that we have committed to about 10 more years in Kentucky. The big part for me is the GIGANTIC garage and the point 41 acres surrounding the place which will allow me to build the shop that I want. In the back yard. If the offer is even accepted. Which it may or may not be. Because the offer is about 30 grand less than the asking price. That may or may not matter because the house has been on the market for the better part of the last year. We celebrated the offer-making with ginger beer floats with rum. That put me a few hundred calories over the 1700. Okay. Back to the diet and weight loss thing tomorrow. Oh yeah, forgot. I'm going to try a juice fast next week. We'll see how that goes.