Saturday, March 08, 2008

update

I know. I need to get more in the habit of posting. It's just I'm so busy with work, when I get home all I want to do is rest.

Allie and I are feverishly planning all sorts of remodeling, with our kitchen being the top priority. A lot of you have seen our kitchen, so you know this is much needed. For those of you who haven't, our kitchen has been half gutted for the last several years after one of our cats climbed up into the drop ceiling and made a home there. We were fine with it until we started to smell the piss she was leaving on top of the cabinets above the sink. So we yanked those out, along with the drop ceiling. Since then, we've been existing with cheap wire shelving and no overhead lighting. Meantime, the crappy old cabinetry that remains is starting to fall apart.

So it's time.

Our current plan is to order hip and affordable cabinets from Ikea and then pay some handyman to install them.

In other news, I am getting ready to try indoor propagation for the first time. No, Allie and I are not backing down on our pact not to have kids. I've ordered tomato and pepper seeds, and I've bought some flourescent light boxes, and I'm going to start the seeds indoors, rather than buy transplants at the nursery come May.

I got bit by the seed catalog fever, though. I wanted pretty much every exotic varietal they had, so I wound up dropping $110 on what is likely way more seeds than I need. Any of you close-by friends want tomato plants? I should have some in a couple months.

Work is going pretty darn good. It's budget time, and this is where pretty much everyone in the city would agree that Funk has what it takes to do the job right. Only problem is we have a council that's nervous about making the tough choices, and a city manager who is actively campaigning them to not make the tough choices. On the other hand, we've got pretty much the entire business community, the neighborhood groups and the chief of police on our side. So we're thinking our odds aren't bad.

But here's the deal. If we don't prevail, and the current budget proposal goes through, the city's going to start running out of money by summer's end. And then we're going to make damn sure the council and city manager own the mess. Again, we'll have all the community powers that be chiming in with us as we say "We told you so."

But, hopefully it won't come down to that.

Lastly, running. I've had some pain in my achilles and have had to back off. I did some research online and found that tendinitis can be quite debilitating. Some folks on forums I've read claim to have been out of commission for many months. Hopefully I will avoid that by stopping running early, and by doing exercises aimed at strengthening the muscles around the achilles. I've also been doing a lot of other strengthening exercises, which are supposed to lessen my chances at injury.

Meantime, I'm going to get a good bike, which I've needed for some time. And it's looking like things might finally warm up around here, so that I can ride fairly regularly.

As a result, the Flying Pig is off. I'd like to run a marathon in the fall, probably New York or Minneapolis, but I'm going to wait and see how this tendon thing plays out. I'm also considering holding off on doing another marathon until next year, and instead building myself up toward one even more slowly, by training for a 5k, then 10k, then half marathon first.

I'll keep you posted, obviously. And I'll try to post more regularly.

1 comment:

Fred Sanford said...

good luck with the budget; and what's up with the city manager? does he think manna will actually fall from heavan and he'll be seen as...i don't know what, a juju man? seriously, he has to KNOW that things can't keep on this way, even IF the entire bite for the combined sewage/water system is offloaded onto the public - there's still the freaking holes in every road in town, as well as their accompanying steel plate; $$$$$ commitments to union station, the free fire zone downtown, the dang sports complex, old and new TIFs that don't ever seem to return a dime, normal maintenance, salaries...

oh, hell - just fire the guy.