Tuesday, July 15, 2014

My life is bags

My life is organized into three bags that I carry around in my car. Well, 3 bags and a beautiful wife is more accurate but this is really about the bags. I have my work bag, that contains my laptop and other work stuff. We work in a non assigned work area so I live out of my work bag every day at work. At the end of the work day I pack it up and take it with me to my car. Then I have my workout bag. Every morning I go to the gym, I open my bag and remove the carefully packed workout gear. On goes the triathlon watch, on goes the ipod, then I bust through whatever training I have scheduled for the day. Repack the bag and off to work. The third bag is my tennis bag, rackets and shoes and clothes to play. Every day after work, I drive to my club, change into my tennis gear and hit the courts. Generally I hit for an hour with someone and then for an hour on the ball machine. Then home. All three bags come out of the car, go on the table and get repacked for the next day. It is an interesting way to live but it feels organized.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Wrapping myself in the flag.

I have just realized something about myself that I want to get onto paper(Ha). My end goal, what I really want at the end of all of my training and competing and improving, is to be asked to wear my countries colors in an international competition. I know this sounds crazy but it isn't as bad as it sounds. The US sends an aged group Davis cup team to an international tennis tournament every year with age groups starting at 35 and ending at 90 so I have a lot of time there. Also qualifying for an ITU World Cup Triathalon in your age group permits you to wear the red white and blue. I had no idea that this was what I wanted until this morning but I do know that I am willing to work to get it. Bring on the pain.

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

I have a panther!

We have two cats, well really my wife has a cat and I have a cat. Mine is a beautiful Bombay named Tibalt(The Prince of Cats) Who is loving and destructive and weighs in at a svelt 17 pounds. My wifes is a Maine Coon named drifter. He is very nice and cuddly with her but really doesn't like me much.
My wife and I both have a strange sense of humor that a lot of people don't seem to really "get". When we moved into our house, one of us, and we cannot agree on who, must have told the electric company that we had a large cat.( Referring to Drifter I guess)So after about 6 months of living there I get a call from them. They are very polite and inform me that a meter reader will be coming out to read my meter and could I please put my animal away. Confused, I ask them what animal and they tell me that it is in my files that we have a large cat. I laugh and explain to them that although we do have a large housecat he is not dangerous and their reader will be fine. 6 months later, same call, and 6 months after that. I tried 4 times to get them to remove that from our file but they seem to be incapable of doing that. Finally I just said fine, I will put him away. The operator pauses for a brief instant and then asks, if you don't mind what kind of cat is he? At this point, I am fed up so I say a Puma, I have a Puma in a tiny house. She laughs nervously and then hangs up. I guess I will probably have to answer these calls for the duration of our stay in this house...

Monday, June 30, 2014

Hobby Farm Boy

I am going to do a few posts about interesting things about me. Just because it seems like a logical thing to do, so you can all know something about me. So here we go! I grew up on a farm, not like a real farm though, a hobby farm. My parents thought that it would be a good learning experience for me to take care of some animals. We had a flock of sheep( Like 12), a bunch of chickens, some horses(Late in my youth, and a series of cats, dogs, gerbils etc. The sheep were the big work, chickens mostly care for themselves. Sheep though, up at 5 to clean the pen and give them hay in the winters, after school more hay. It was a serious chore. Plus they are dumb as bricks. We had one ram, his name was Rambo, because I was like 12 and it seemed hilarious. The first time you get in a pen with a ram he assumes that you too are a ram and he does what he does to other rams, he hits you with his head. Being well versed in the ways of sheep, I knew that I had to stop him and push him on his side, to establish dominance. The problem is that 12 year old me weighed about 100 pounds and Rambo weighed about 275 so the first few times in the pen looked more like a game of tag than anything else. Unfortunately losing the game would probably have meant broken bones. Eventually I was able to get him and after that he left me alone but throughout my childhood it never stopped being funny to let my friends get in with Rambo. So I was a hobby farm boy. And for the record it did instill a pretty good work ethic, thanks mom and dad.

Sunday, June 29, 2014

I read a book yesterday, yea the whole book!

It was called "Lets Forget This Ever Happened" by Jenny Lawson and if you have a random sense of humor( Like me) I suggest you check it out immediately. It is part memoir, part comedy and all well written in a sort of awesome rambly sprawl. It was good enough that apart from training it consumed me for an entire day so that should say something if you know me. So there you go, I suggest that you find it and read it and let me know what you think! I am training today, of course, hitting and swimming and running and biking various distances that no one probably cares about. Wife is out of town visiting her parents so I am a bit lonely but my severe introversion makes that easy to deal with. Often when she is gone I read books that I have read a million times because it is like visiting friends. So yea that's all, I need to figure out some sort of structure for posts.

Saturday, June 28, 2014

Meeeeee

Hi! I have been using blogs as self tracking devices for years but I never tell anyone how to find them! I just putter along using it to track training or life stuff until I have a handle on it and then I stop posting to it. I was also one of the posters on a huge nerd blog a few years back but that pretty much disintegrated for some reason. So this is just me, writing, maybe I will actually tell some people where this is! I am an oddity in that I don't know anyone else quite like me. I enjoy nerdy things like role playing games and larp but I am driven to excel in non nerdy things like tennis and running and triathalon. This is possibly due to some sort of scarring from my childhood. I am obsessive in my pursuits, like severely obsessive. I have been working on tennis for the last 4 or 5 years and I train every day, like every day without fail. I can count the number of times that I have not trained on one hand and I remember each of those days vividly( Mostly funerals and hospital time). So why should you want to read my blog? I have no idea! Maybe you don't! I am just going to try to post a couple times a week about stuff I am doing or nerdy things that I enjoy. I have to run now though because I have a 4 hour training day today, 1 hour on the ball machine a singles match and then 2 hours in the gym doing triathalon stuff, see it might be fun to watch me be crazy!