Late Update

OK, so February is already half way over and the last time I gave you an update was . . . let me see . . . Holy Cow, 28 days!.  Sorry about that.  Life's been busy, but I recently worked it out so that I won't be working my second job nearly as much.  Hopefully this'll give me a better work-life balance.

Enough about that, onto the bedroom!  We got quite a bit of work done on the bedroom.  It feels like a real bedroom now, and not just a room with a bed and furniture in it.  We got rid of that giant bedframe, installed a bunch of Ikea furniture and have moved/sorted most of the clothes and items.  On that front there's still some work to be done, but I'd say we got like 80-90% of the bedroom project done. Isn't it always that last 10% that seems to be the hardest to finish?  Must be the fact that you've already accomplished so much and now the improvements you see are only marginal.  Oh well.

I was hoping to move on to working on the garage, but so far February seems to be a recuperating month.  Or maybe a prioritizing month?  It's still up in the air.  Don't get me wrong, we've done some work on the garage so far, but nothing as dedicated as the bedroom.  Our social activities have increased again (or at least mine have) which has cut into the project productive time.  That's the big issue isn't it?  You want all these rewards and goals but you have to work towards them and more than that, you have to figure out what you're going to cut back on in order to achieve them.  It's more than just adding to your plate.  It's really about replacing something that's already on your plate with the new stuff.  Figuring out what it is you're currently doing that is less impactful than what you're striving for.  I'll admit that is no easy task for myself.

Right now our biggest goals are to 1) get out of debt and 2) get healthy enough (mentally and physically) to have a kid.  In reality, the get out of debt goal ties into the whole kid thing as well.  So I guess it could be summed up to get into a stable enough situation (mentally, physically, and financially) so that we won't freak out over the idea of trying to start a family.  We've always sort of had that goal, but this year it looks like we're making the biggest concerted effort towards it.  Maybe I just need to focus on the big picture to remind me of what's important.  Maybe?

Bedroom Progress

Progress has been made!  We've put together Ikea furniture, installed drawers, and even put clothes and a few objects in their new locations.  There's still more drawers to be installed and filled and we're still debating on whether we want to replace the dresser with a bigger, more fitting, dresser.  Plus there are still boxes of items we need to go through
, and a giant bed to dispose of some how.

We have hit a snag in our motivation in all this: our tub has a crack.  It's not a very big crack, yet, but it does kind of defeat the purpose of the tub, which is to hold water.  We remodeled the bathroom a year or two ago with a friend, and it was kind of a learning experience for us.  I've never remodeled a room before and so I was learning the various step needed to do it, figuring it was like putting together a Lego set, but with more complicated pieces.  It's a little more complicated than that.  Anyways, we weren't really planning on having to redo the bathroom so soon; finish what started, sure, but not completely restart it.  So now we're just going to patch it up, and be careful. Hopefully it'll hold together until we save enough (and research enough) to have someone come in and redo the bathroom.

Stupid tub crack, doesn't even glow like on Dr Who

(I have now figured out that the garage will have to be it's own Monthly Challenge).

Monthly Challenges instead of Resolutions

Every year around this time, like most people, I make resolutions or goals for the whole year.  And usually by September I've forgotten what they were.  This year I'm going to try a twist.  Instead of a year long resolution to do 50 different things, I'm going to break it up into month long challenges. For 1 month I'll focus on 1 goal, and see how close I can come towards achieving it.  Maybe for 1 month I'll try to read as many books as I can, another month I'll learn about painting minis and paint my board game pieces.  One month might be a frugal month, where I try to save as much money as possible. Another month I might see if can learn to play an instrument within the allotted time or pull off a handstand.  These are all ideas of things I'd like to try accomplish that I've never really gotten around to doing.  As another motivator, I can document my progress here on the blog, maybe with updates every Thursday.  That way I have a way to see that progress actually was made.

For January, I'm thinking that the challenge will be to get the bedroom and garage clean and organized.  The bedroom has been in a state of transition ever since we got the house.  We've never gotten it to a state that we feel happy with and it's about time we reconciled that.  We've already made some progress (at least in the bedroom), by replacing the giant old bed with a simple frame and installing some Ikea items, but there's still a lot of sorting and organizing that needs to be done.

The current condition of the bedroom

Our closet with its recent Ikea addition

That looks entirely doable with in a month, but that's only because we moved a bunch of stuff that used to be in there into other rooms, which is a little unfair to the other rooms.  Reasonably, we'll have to find homes for all those things as well.  Some of them will be brought back into the room and others will find homes elsewhere, like possibly Goodwill, or the dump.

The guest room, currently hosting various bedroom items.

The old giant dresser, disheveled

The old headboard, now an awkward bookcase in the hall.

And that's just the bedroom.  The garage is a whole other beast to deal with.  Since we've had the house I think it's been in a usable state maybe 3 times.  We've had to get a storage unit, just so we can move some items out that we plan to go through later.  The plan is to get it to point that we can easily store what we need in there and also have enough space for Emily to work in it like it was her studio.  I think it's an achievable goal, even if it is a little daunting.  Hopefully the momentum of getting the bedroom done will carry us through the garage. Hopefully.

Surprisingly, not the worst condition it's ever been in.

4 Hour Chef - Meal 1

My sister got me the book 4 Hour Chef for my birthday and I have to say I enjoy what I've read so far.  There's a lot of info in this book, and not all of it is cooking related, but I've found all of it interesting.  I thought it'd be fun to actually follow/learn from the book and I've always wanted to cook by way through a cookbook.  Interestingly the recipes are laid out in such an order as to help slowly build one's skills.  I don't think I'll be able to follow the time frame suggested (2 meals a week) due to work schedules and (mostly) due to the cost of supplies, but I plan to tackle each recipe when I can.

I tried my hand at the first recipe, Osso "Buko", a delicious lamb recipe that basically comes down to just throwing everything in a pot and cooking it.  The goal of this meal is to teach some basic knife skills (in which I learned that I've been holding my knife wrong all this time) and gain some confidence.  It was a fairly easy dish and came out really well.  To complete the meal Emily made a spinach side dish and we used some of the leftover wine as a drink.

I'm not sure why the photos of the lamb turned out so yellow while the spinach photo looks just fine.  That's a photography question.

2013 Goals review - July

It's been a while since I updated this and things haven't really progressed much.  I read Divergent and Insurgent for the new book club I joined. Divergent was pretty good, but I didn't really enjoy Insurgent all that much.  It wasn't bad, it just didn't connect with me.  I'm currently reading A Wise Man's Fear, the sequel to Name of the Wind, and really enjoying it so far.  I think this might be one of my favorite series.  I'm also reading/working through The 4-Hour Chef, which my sister gave me as an early birthday present.

I'm hoping to cook my way through it, though I think there are some later chapters where he talks about cooking /surviving in the wild as well as some crazy molecular-gastronomy recipes I might not be able to do or afford, but we'll see how it goes when I get there.  My plan is to post about it as I go.

We've made some progress on the garage.  We recently started going through my old Magic: The Gathering cards with plans to sell them off.  I'm not sure how much money we could actually get for it all or what the money will go towards, but the way things are going we've got some time to think about our options.  In keeping with the selling-off-stuff motif, we've planned a garage sale for August 23-24.  It'll be over at the Beeby's house and include our stuff, their stuff, and some of the Malecha's stuff.  I created a Tumblr page for it, we'll see how well that goes.

Here's what I've accomplished so far this year.

• Game/Recreation Related
• Played a game of Fiasco
• DM a small campaign (Mouse Guard, Supernatural, or Shadowrun)
• Play the quick play game of Leverage RPG
• Play Artemis
• Play through Mass Effect 3
• Play through Assassin's Creed: Revelations
• Play through Assassin's Creed 3
• Get all achievements on Dance Central 2 (requires help from someone else or a dance party)
• Play through Dance Central 3 [Finished campaign, haven't played all the new songs]
• Collect all Riddler trophies in Batman: Arkham City [Slowly making progress]
• Paint my first mini (most likely board game related)
• Play all of the games I own at least once or sell them off (what I have left unplayed: The Amazing Race game, Acquire, Anima: Shadow of Omega, Catch Phrase, Pumpkin King, Rook, Sorry Sliders, Space Cadets)
• Play through Bioshock: Infinite
• House Related
• Clean out the garage
• Paint the hall
• Redo the downstairs bathroom (involves buying a new tub and installing all the tile we have)
• Install a Dishwasher
• Remodel the kitchen (nothing expansive just: install some track lighting, open up the island, install pot rack,get a new faucet, dishwasher, reorganize cabinets, repaint cabinet doors)
• Finish the bedroom (mostly Ikea closet pieces, installing curtains, and setting up a workspace for Emily)
• Create a nursery/child's bedroom
• Finish the upstairs bathroom (repaint the windowsill, glue down the door jam/floor connector thingy)
• Well Being
• Be in better shape (get back to 150~160 pounds)
• Meditate Regularly (30 minutes day?)
• Have a healthy kid
• Acquire more financial freedom
• Open our Comic/Game/Geekery store
• Read more books for fun [Book Count = 5, started/joined a book club]
• Cook my way through 4 Hour Chef

2013 Goals review - April

Emily and I set-up a weekly schedule of sorts, Tuesday is Family Meeting Night, Wednesday we take some time to work on a house project (lately it's been going through at least 1 box of things), Thursday is for working towards the game store.  This at least provides some direction.

The last few weeks or so I had some trouble moving and doing.  It could be bouts of depression and/or dealing with sleep apnea.  Either way I probably need some professional help in dealing with them.  Lately we've been staying up until midnight or so before falling asleep, not for any real reason than just being on our laptops (Emily's usually playing Candy Crush or Bubble Witch while I get sucked into either Marvel: Avenegers Alliance or Reddit).  I don't know why I decided to look into Reddit, but there you have it.

Currently, at least, things are looking better.  Emily's back on Amour which means she's not so physically incapacitated anymore and springs trying to arrive, which means nicer days and better moods.

Here's what I've accomplished so far this year.

• Game/Recreation Related
• Played a game of Fiasco
• DM a small campaign (Mouse Guard, Supernatural, or Shadowrun)
• Play the quick play game of Leverage RPG
• Play Artemis
• Play through Mass Effect 3
• Play through Assassin's Creed: Revelations
• Play through Assassin's Creed 3
• Get all achievements on Dance Central 2 (requires help from someone else or a dance party)
• Play through Dance Central 3 [Started playing]
• Collect all Riddler trophies in Batman: Arkham City [Slowly making progress]
• Paint my first mini (most likely board game related)
• Play all of the games I own at least once or sell them off (what I have left unplayed: The Amazing Race game, Acquire, Anima: Shadow of Omega, Catch Phrase, Pumpkin King, Rook, Sorry Sliders, Space Cadets)
• House Related
• Clean out the garage
• Paint the hall
• Redo the downstairs bathroom (involves buying a new tub and installing all the tile we have)
• Install a Dishwasher
• Remodel the kitchen (nothing expansive just: install some track lighting, open up the island, install pot rack,get a new faucet, dishwasher, reorganize cabinets, repaint cabinet doors)
• Finish the bedroom (mostly Ikea closet pieces, installing curtains, and setting up a workspace for Emily)
• Create a nursery/child's bedroom
• Finish the upstairs bathroom (repaint the windowsill, glue down the door jam/floor connector thingy)
• Well Being
• Be in better shape (get back to 150~160 pounds)
• Meditate Regularly (30 minutes day?)
• Have a healthy kid
• Acquire more financial freedom
• Open our Comic/Game/Geekery store
• Read more books for fun [Book Count = 3, started/joined a book club]

Name of The Wind review

Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss is a great fantasy epic.  It's the first in a trilogy and takes place in a land where magic is exerted through the power of belief, basically if you believe hard enough a rock will float it does.  It's more technical than that, but the way it's handled adds a nice science flair to it.  The story follows a red haired man named Kvothe, who's quick witted and seems to quickly grasp anything put in front of him.  I really enjoyed the style of the writing, the author's voice if you will.  I think I would describe it as conversational storytelling.  It eases you into the world and keeps the pace steady, quickly moving from one interesting scene to the next.

I really fell into this story and if you like fantasy I highly recommend you give this one a read.

Monthly Goal Review

It's been roughly a month since I posted what I wanted to accomplish this year, so I figured it might be good to review how things are going.  See what's working and what's not.

• Game/Recreation
• I've played some Dance Central 2, which gets me closer to the 3500 calorie achievement (I still have like 1000 to go).
• Played some more Batman Arkham City.
• I've scheduled an Artemis party with some friends of mine.
• House Related
• I've been washing a load of dishes before going to bed most nights.
• We've been paring down the overall clutter around the house.
• I think the major house projects will be tackled once the weather gets nicer.
• Well Being
• I read Name of the Wind, which was a really good read. I plan on writing more about it in a future post.
• I've been increasing my exercise a little, but we think the biggest health issue for me as well as for Emily is that we have trouble eating regularly.
• We're refinancing the house, which should decrease the payments some.

Some things I've need to work on still:

• I'm still drawn into the Marvel Avengers Alliance facebook game more than I should be, but I have cut back on how often I'm playing it.
• I've collected objects to try to sell online, but I haven't posted anything yet.
• I still need to schedule a time of the week to get together with Emily and talk about things, whether it's family life or the store or finances or whatever.
• I also have been thinking I need to just set aside some time to research/plan the store.  I figure I'd be working there in the evenings if it was open, so I might as well spend that time trying to open it.

Not the greatest start, but a least I'm making progress right?  There's still plenty of year left.