---------------------------------------- Move your feet May 22nd, 2018 ---------------------------------------- It's been a while since my last phlog*. I've been wanting to get back on gopher and do some serious plain text awesomeness, or at least comment on the really cool happenings around the space. Cat, love your diet, tell me more! How are you and your partner going to handle it when you go back down under? Sparkipx, how's Felix holding up now that you've been able to ride for a couple weeks? Is it harder to do long distances on a folding bike than a non-folding one? I've never tried one before. jynx, I'm totally fascinated by single player RPGs and I need to go back through and read up on your stuff. Tabletop role-playing is my #1 activity of awesome, and that sounds stellar. horsemans has a cool gopher wishlist that you guys should check out. I bet you can offer a lot of responses there. [0] (TXT) [0] horesmans - gopher wishlist Several of you are on vacation or soon returning. Welcome back and all that. I hope you'll share insights and adventures. I love travel stories so much. Hell, I love STORIES so much. tfurrows, I'll be checking out Variations soon! Oh, and I have a Fiskers push-mower and it's badass. I have to use it twice a week or the grass grows too long for it to be effective. That part sucks. But if you have a really small lawn, it's so nice to be able to handle it quietly and "naturally". Recently I've been absorbed in a string of poor projects at work that have been eating up my mental energies. The work isn't hard, but the clients have been difficult. I've been avoiding unnecessary computer time as a way of disconnecting. Marry that up with some unexpected (but welcome) consulting work, and my time became even more short. Mostly, though, the thing that's kept me away is a rededication to that principle I mentioned in recent posts, deliberate practice. I've been working on my shakuhachi quite a bit, and even met with my kali instructor in the park at the side of a lake for a fantastic jam in the rain. He built me a new shakuhachi, which is just fantastic. It's a 1.9 (slightly deeper sound than the standard 1.8) jin nashi flute and it's absolutely perfect. I'll be sewing a new case for it soon, and an extra for him as well in thanks. I've also been walking a shit-ton. Every morning I wake at 6:35 and head outside to walk 2 to 2.5 miles on the canal towpath that is the road I live on. Each evening, after putting my son to bed, I head back outside and do another 2 miles. Sometimes I zip around the neighborhood for a change of scenery. Sometimes I head into town and walk the sidewalks. Most often I stay next to the canal where I know the landscape features that mark my distance by heart. I pop headphones in and binge audiobooks while I'm out there. It's heaven. Walking is a "keystone habit" for me, a term I learned from that book on Habits with the yellow cover that I can't remember the name of. When I walk, I do other good things as well. I eat well, I sleep well, I think clearly. If I don't walk, holding on to the other things is more difficult. So, walking rocks! Hopefully I'll have more to share soon. In the meantime, I need to go for a walk. ------ * I have a pet peeve about when people waste time in blogs and phlogs talking about how they haven't posted in a long time. That's the nature of the medium and the repetitive act of explaining or apologizing for it serves no purpose except to make you self-conscious. Now here I am doing it myself. Stupid.