For as long as I have had any thoughts on the kind of desk I might want, I have wanted to have a clean simple desk that was basically a shelf that extended the entire length of a wall. When we moved into our current house, one of the bedrooms became my office and was mine to do with as I wanted. It had the perfect place to put the a wall to wall desk and so that is what I decided to do. The major problem with this was that since I wanted it to exactly fit a wall over 9 feet long, it was going to have to be a custom desk.
This is where we come to one of my personality traits that I think can be quite useful, but that I am pretty sure my wife finds extremely frustrating at times (or more likely, all the time). When it comes to buying something for myself, or working on one of my personal projects I gain a patience that is nearly unending. I first started really designing the desk (and the office in general) on Dec 9, 2010. Today, a short 238 days later, I actually started building it. I am not entirely sure how it will turn out, or how long it is going to take me but I thought it might be fun to actually record it in real time.
Something needed to be done. I have become addicted to constant news, updates, the latest gadgets, upgrades, and rumors. I spend way more time reading tips and techniques for improving my photography than I actually spend photographing things. Reading tech blogs does nothing but make me crave the newest gadgets and gizmos. Most of all, I fell prey to my uncontrollable desire to move any progress bar I am given to completion. No matter how much time I spend reading stories, looking at pictures, and skimming headlines, there were always more unread items waiting. If I did actually finish, there would be more in 30 minutes or less. It never stopped. According to Google Reader, my dealer of choice, since October 11, 2006 I have read 285, 079 items. In the last month along I have read 3,599 items. Until today, I had 81 RSS feeds that I was following completely, and even that is down from a much larger number 6 months ago. But no more, I have deleted all but a very few, 3 per week at the most, feeds. Not completely ready to cut ties, I saved off by big list of feeds for now, but here’s hoping that it stays stored away.
This is in addition to a social networking “friend” purge I did a couple months ago. There too I realized I was spending completely unnecesary time being updating on the lives of people that I had had zero contact with for years, or who I had only fleeting contact with but had ended up in the perpetual internet connection. There again, I said, no more deleted 100-150 “friends” and have been all the happier since. I am not wasting the time I was before, and I am less distracted in dealing with the people I actual know and care about.
Let see what productive things I can do now.
As much as I love doing theatre and being in shows, there are a ton of advantages to not being in a show at all. I record this here to both inform and entertain my readers, but equally so to remind myself the next time I decide it is a good idea to do shows back to back right after making a sort of significant life change like buying a house. In no particular order, some of the advantages are as follows:
- My body has time to heal. I tend to be fairly hard on my body when doing shows. This includes both not stopping to be sick and throwing my body around with reckless abandon. Almost all shows that I have a significant role in, I end up bruised and aching. It’s nice to heal.
- Sleep: it’s kind of cool and I enjoy it.
- Home cooked dinner at the table with my wife. Somewhere along the way, having fast food 8 times a week stopped being the ideal way to eat. Now that we aren’t at the theatre every night, not only do we have time to get groceries, but we get to eat in our house instead of in the car on the way to the theatre.
- Who knew it was possible to go out and do fun thing or even do chores on random nights of the week?
- At no point do I ever find myself in bed/shower/work trying to peel mic tape off of my neck.
- It is actually possible to get a tan when I am not inside a a dark theatre every weekend.
I’d like to share a very short from the date night Amy and I went on last night. On our way to continue our long running putt-putt tournement, we stopped off at the mall to run a few errands. Also, since she had earlier mentioned the possibility of eating at chick-fa-la, we were required, by our own private rules, to eat there. Up to this point, things are pretty normal. What made this particular night different is that the Merritt Island mall had an entire orchestra set up just outside the food court. They were from Liberty College though that particlar factoid is wholy unimportant. If you have never experienced such a thing, let me assure you that a full orchestra soundtrack makes the food court and really the whole mall visit significantly more “epic” feeling. AfteriMAge finishing giving our order, Amy stopped the guy helping us as the music backdrop began to grow louder and more power, “and wait for it. Wait for it. Wait for it….” the music peaked in a huge note and copias amounts of cymbol crahes. “Polynesian sause.” Neither I nor the guy behind the counter could really contol our laughter.
Yes, I know you probably don’t find it funny at all. You probably had to be there. Maybe next time we find ourselves ordering chicken sandwiches with live music soundtrack and I forget to order Polynesian sause just as the music peaks, you can join us. You will probably appreciate just a little more why I love my wife so much.
As of this past Monday, I have completely paid off my car that I bought four and a half years ago. Since I bought the car with less than 200 miles on it I decided to start accurately tracking my gasoline purchases starting from the very beginning, and in an amazing and uncharacteristic feat, I managed to keep up with that record keeping for the full 4.5 years. Because of that, I can tell you a number of things, in that time, I have paid as little as $1.62 and as much as $4.00, but averaged $2.68 per gallon. On average I get 28.05 miles per gallon, 54.71 miles per day, and $5.01 per day. I have driven 56,529 miles and have filled up my gas tank 169 times with a total of 1974.57 gallons at a total cost of $5276.22. It is also slightly crazy that I have a spreadsheet to tell me all of this.
I’ll leave you with a graph of my own personal price for gasoline from July 2005 – December 2009
