Untitled?

I labored over a title for this quote for a while, but couldn't come up with anything.

I haven't updated in a little while, but this might be brief anyway.

Running is still progressing. I ran 2 miles in less than 16 minutes both Monday and Tuesday this week. Not terribly fast, but it seems a good pace for me. I'd like to get that down a bit more, but don't know how/whether I'll really do it.

I finished a bunch of stuff for guitar building and began the process of building a neck. I have a few other things I need to work out, but I've already messed something up. While routing the truss rod cavity (for a one-piece neck, this goes through the back of the neck) I got my template reversed and now I'll be making a left handed neck. Because this neck isn't really intended to take any sort of load (pine isn't hard enough) it's fine. I need some double-stick tape (the thick foam-padded kind, not the two-sided scotch-tape kind) before I can continue.

Back in junior high (ten years ago...that's kind of odd) I used to play Magic: The Gathering a bit. I mostly played with my brother, my friends and his friends, but I tended to play much better than any of them did, so they quit playing with me... I saw that Wizards of the Coast (the company who prints the Magic cards) was giving decks away...so I ordered one. It turned out to be split into two mini-decks...so I taught Erin to play. She seems to like it, so I think we'll try to get into it. Hopefully all of my cards are still at my parents house; when my grandmother moved in with them, a lot of my stuff got moved into a trailer that was at a storage facility...the trailer got stolen, so loads of my stuff (including my really old copies of Lord of the Rings among other books) got stolen along with it. The cards were, I believe, in my closet, which was largely untouched, as far as I can remember, so I have reason to hope. Erin and I are planning to go back to Katy the weekend after next (May 9, probably) and hopefully we'll pick them up then.

I like this song: Ievan Polkka and might make a ringtone from it sometime. In other phone news, I'm 99.999% sure I'm going to buy the Google Developer version of the G1 phone. The OS looks really good and the hardware seems tough enough and well built. I'm pretty excited.

When you get home, I'm skipping town

I had a couple of holidays off from work this past weekend, but the weekend wasn't that great. I started doing some minor work on guitar neck building (building a jig to cut the truss rod mounting cavity and a 3/4" thick neck routing template). Neither one came out perfect, and the jig was actually unusable. I was pretty down because I'd already put a lot of effort into these builds and didn't have a lot to show for it. Saturday, my mom called me to borrow a bunch of money. Against my better judgment, I agreed. Hopefully she'll pay me back on the schedule we agreed on. 5k is kind of a lot of money and I really don't want to have to seriously hound her about it. Sunday wasn't a lot better because Erin wanted to go shopping or something, but everything was closed for Easter (why is Easter bigger than Christmas? Shit stays open on Christmas...and schools cancel for Christmas, whereas they don't for Easter.....) We wound up just sitting around the house most of the day.

I started to feel better on Monday because I bought some more MDF and built that jig with much better rate of success. I'm still a little down (not terribly sure why...just have been feeling like I'm not good at anything lately...hopefully it will pass).

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I've been exercising pretty regularly since my last post. Mon., Tues., Thurs. and Fri. I run 2 miles then walk another 2. I've got my first mile down to about 7 minutes and my 2nd is around 9.5. Those numbers are a bit skewed because the first mile is downhill for the most part, while the second is up. I've also been doing some jacknifes and pushups 2 nights a week each. Basically, I'm just pushing to the point of exhaustion. I push the pushups a bit harder than the jacknifes and am at around a nightly total of 130-150 or so right now (number of reps per set being as many as I can do, starting at around 40-50 and descending from there). I'm trying to do jacknifes Mon. and Thurs., pushups Tues. and Fri. 2 days rest between each and taking weekends off. Erin and I have been walking a bit (usually walking somewhere to go eat) on the weekends, so that's some additional exercise. I've lost somewhere between 15 and 18 lbs now since I started a little more than a month ago. It's a bit fast, but my start weight was really exaggerated (I ate a HUGE dinner, then a giant breakfast and a pretty large lunch, then weighed myself). It's really probably closer to 10-15 lbs. I've been pretty happy with the food changes; because I'm eating a bit less, food seems to just taste better; I'm drinking a lot more water. Plus, groceries have gotten a bit cheaper, too.