the_vulture

For the last few days, my life has revolved around the activities of the contractors I've been assigned to keep track off. They are currently grading the roads, as specified by the engineer, into my uncle's future subdivision. I've been noting start and stop times for various pieces of equipment, in particular the bulldozer (henceforth, the Cat) and two dump trucks (nicknamed Red and Blue (though blue is really red, white, and blue, but I digress...)). I've been pretty much fixed to staying in visual contact of Red and Blue so I can keep track of how many loads of dirt they take and where they take them. The task has it's inconveniences, but, at the same time, it gives me a lot of opportunity to catch up on various stationary activities, like blogging, for example. 

Of course, having to continually focus at least part of my attention on the trucks may have slightly deleterious effects upon my sanity, as demonstrated by my rather one sided conversations with the trucks ("Red, where are you? Ah, there you are. What the hell took you so long? Blue, did you just head out the other way when I wasn't looking?!?")

My dad gets to play with a loader and an excavator whilst I sit around all day; that's not fair.

Meanwhile, the exercise regime has been shot to crap over the last week and a bit. I'd been doing well establishing a routine of running, cycling and yoga over the last several weeks, but that ended early last week when I came down with a rather nasty chest cold. At the same time, my right knee started acting up again. I think I may have moved oddly in my sleep, as I woke up in the middle of the night with it being a bit sore. I attempted to end the lack of cardio yesterday with a bike ride out on the property. That lasted all of ten minutes. Granted, I hit the road hard and fast, but I didn't expect to soon be coughing hard enough to see spots. Nope, cardio, at least hard cardio, will have to wait for a while still.
 
The job hunt isn't going as well as I would like. A call centre job I had an over the phone screening interview for has declined to offer. I strongly suspect that I'm 'overqualified'; few people will hire someone they think will be moving on very soon, as I suspect they think I would. I wonder how many people have been stuck unemployed simply because they were 'overqualified' for all the work that was actually available. *sigh* Still, I'm fairly hopeful I'll pick up something fairly soon; I'm just trying to keep from settling for minimum wage work.

With lots of time available for things like blogging, I've started the transfer of entries from person.com to here. I've been posting them using the Date Out of Order function, so they'll be in the appropriate chronological order. I've also begun putting tags into my past entries. I've become quite fond of tag clouds in my other blog and was pleased to discover that I could use them here, as I was selecting a new theme for my LJ blog (Do you like?). It's going to take a long time to get things sufficiently tagged, methinks.

(What is Red doing now?)

Other odds and ends:

• I've purchased and arranged for the delivery of 1grl_revolution's birthday pressie.
• I've recorded a chapter of the novel I've been reading to my girlfriend. I'll have to get that burnt to disk and sent out sometime soon, as well as the really cute pressie I picked up for her. 
• I've been seeing coloured balls rolling around in spirals and such whenever I close my eyes, courtesy of playing way too much Zuma.
• I've discovered that Chucky really, really doesn't like the utility jeep. He'll let you walk up pretty close before ducking into his hole, but he bolts for it on hearing the jeep.
  

And that's about it for now.

Well, as some of you may have guessed, having had time to recover my mental equilibrium to at least some extent, I've once again attempted to resume my running training, this time with greater success. My new training schedule is based on one created for novice 10k runners that can be found here:

http://www.halhigdon.com/10ktr aining/10knovice.htm

Last week, I ran three times, twice for 3.5 miles, and again for 5.2. In attempting to actually follow the routine, on Saturday, I also rode my mountain bike for a little over an hour for cross training. That's the first time I've ridden any real distance on a bike for, ummm..., decades. That actually did a number on my legs and, yesterday, I was only able to run 3.5 miles when I had intended to run 5.5. Ah well, I did do a long run earlier last week, so that'll count for it. Hal's program allows that kind of flexibility.

As you may have guessed from the times and distances involved, I've NOT gone all the way back to the beginning of that training schedule. In fact, I'm somewhere around week 7. With some modification, I plan to make that my weekly routine. That'll put me in perpetual readiness to run a 10k with only a few days notice. Neat, no?

Speaking of the routine, today I have to do some stretching and strength building. That will consist of an hour long session of yoga, methinks. I'm quite a newb in regards to yoga, but I at least some degree of pride in the fact that I could do the standing tree pose without a chair or even wobbling all that much on my first try (Go Aikido and Tai Chi balance training!). At some point in the somewhat near future, I'll be looking local martial arts clubs to add some flavour, too.

My upper body is already seeing the benefit of all the various bits of manual labour I've been doing around the property. My chest, shoulders and arms are really starting to firm up and I seem to be filling out my shirts a little better across the chest. As well, the strong definition of my forearms is slowly creeping up my upper arms. If I keep this up, by this time next year, I'll be looking quite studly.

And it's that particular thought that compensates for the ache I'm currently suffering in my legs from the punishment I gave 'em this weekend. *chuckle*