Here we go...

Over the weekend we started the next round of home improvement in earnest. Events have transpired that lead us to the conclusion that we need to get our stuff organized. Good thing too; we just had a rules change at work that's going to make me burn vacation time faster over the next couple of years, so this will help with that.

The first step is to get rid of stuff. Many bags of old kid's clothing has already gone off to charity. Over the weekend, all old toys were brought up, and J now has the unenviable task of sorting through it all, trying to put all the pieces of each toy together in one container so it can be passed on. Some will go to relatives (like the nice stuff; tinkertoys, wooden railway sets, etc), some will go to various charities.

It was fun watching T having fun with toys he hasn't seen in quite a while. He spent over an hour sorting out plastic reptiles and dinosaurs from a "dinosaur party pack", then lining them all up by ranks into a reptile army at his command.

The first part of the work is happening in the basement. There's a lot of stuff down there. There's so little free space that we're going to work in stages; we'll decide what makes sense to start with first, sort the stuff in that area, move it out, do the work, then go to the next area.

I went to Lowes on Sunday afternoon and bought 100 2x4 studs. That should get me started. Happily they're still cheap ($1.99).

I've gotten some decent motivation just from throwing a bunch of crud away, cleaning out the area I need to work in first, sweeping it and putting in a work light in this previously dark area and seeing that it's not so bad when it's clean and bright.

A few days off

I drove to work Thursday and Friday, first time in over a year apart from two separate days when my bike was incapacitated.

It was interesting. I found that my legs were really happy for the time off; by Friday afternoon they felt really, really strong. When I ride every day, they don't really get a chance to recover.

OTOH, even though my legs were feeling better, the whole 4 days off I could feel myself getting fat and slow. Practically hour by hour.

I'll have to drive more this year if I'm to do half the stuff I'd like to get done around the house. But I'm going to try like hell not to do so 2 days in a row.

Even though most days my legs don't feel strong, they actually aren't weak, just exhausted. I'm slowly learning to apply them to kicks in TKD. My form is still horrendous (I feel like a flopping fish most of the time), but my round kick, even though I think it's maybe 20% as effective as it could be, is already halfway to knocking over the wavemaster. If I can get my hips opened up to where I can really roll over into the kick, it'll be pretty good. Even my crescent kicks are getting better, though I still don't have nearly the snap in my hips and back that I need to make that work right. I overdid something with my left leg a few months back and it continues to not be as flexible as the right, and even the right isn't good at all. I'm probably not much above average for my age (43) for flexibility in my legs. I've been trying to remember to get up and stretch once an hour or so at work, and when the conference room down the hall is unoccupied, to get in there a couple of times a day and work my forms through. I don't know how flexible it's possible for an old goat like me to get, but I hope the answer is "a lot more than I am now."