Biggest Loser

I began this year knowing that I needed to focus better on certain areas of life, the only question being which areas those might be. Part of the plan included removing those things that served little purpose.

Purpose is mercurial. A thing may serve a purpose for a while, outlive its usefulness, and become of no use. After a time, it could become useful again.

This blog--and all blogs--has become one of those usefulness-outlived things for me. Back in the day, I started blogging as a way to keep the family members involved in my life away from them. Then I started informing the world. Then it became a means of networking for my writing career. All those things I now do in other ways that don't involve the blog.

My other main blog, in which I wrote about life as a stay-at-home dad, has suffered the same transition: it's no longer relevant enough in my life to warrant the time involved to keep it current.

So, as I look to my Facebook pages to blather on about this and that, I won't completely leave these sites to the dust. I'll come in once in a while, every month, at first, then every season, then every year, then one day, when I'm gone from this earthly mantle, my heirs will look at this and go, "Aha, so that's what Great-grandpa did with his time."

The Hat Trick

It's been a good year, folks. I suppose. Still kicking, still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. Though it's looking like I may never reach the age of responsible maturity.

A few things I'm happy about:

I've gotten back into music. Bought an electric guitar and amp and sound augmentation pedal and went to an impromptu get-together with some old friends, played a private party with a new friend, and am practicing to play in my church's Christmas Eve services. Next year, I hope to be employed more weekends than not in some kind of musical venue.

I still write and edit, mostly for an online financial magazine, but sometimes for something called DemandStudios, which is a little harder, but $15 is $15, even if it takes a couple of hours to make.

My urge to volunteer at my son's school took fruit in something called Masterworks Art Program, where a parent, in my case me, goes into class with a bunch of examples of a certain artist's work and tells the class about the artist and leads them in producing an example of that work. I even get to do some of the art myself, just to show the kids that a human can do the stuff.

Music, writing, art--that's the creative hat trick.

I think next year, I'd like to continue the music and add a marathon and the loss of 30 pounds of fatty tissue from my body. See you here this time next year to see how that went.

Heavy metal chess

Everyone has wanted to build a chess set out of hardware pieces at one point or another. Okay, not everybody, but anyone who knows that Ace is the place with the helpful hardware man. And a rocking selection of nuts and bolts.

Besides the desire to move chess pieces around a board again, I also acquired knowledge of bolts I'd not known about before. Namely the slotted hex nut, or as it's also known, the castle hex nut. It looks like a crenelated castle wall.

Also learned about the flanged hex nut, along with the flanged hex bolt.

Plus, I learned that half-inch hardware can get expensive, so I went with five-sixteenths instead. And some metric thing I'm not sure what it meant for the rooks. Those were $2 each, which really blew my budget out of the water. (Thanks, Discover Card Rewards.)

Some tips for would-be builders: Ace Hardware has bags and pens so you can write down what you're getting, how many, and how much for each. Don't wait till you've got a pile of hardware before going back to find how much they cost and what they were called. Unless you have an extra 15, 20 minutes.

Keep an eye on your growing pile of hardware while you're looking for other hardware. Somebody might decide it needs put back in the drawers.

Be ready to substitute. Sometimes your list of materials might include something not available at your store. That means being flexible with design options. For instance, the design I was using had something called a long-sleeved hex bolt for the queen and king. No such thing in my Ace, so I went with a group of hex nuts. That gave me a new idea for the final version of those pieces and the bishops.

You've probably seen programs from time to time about sculptors who work in junk, using nuts and bolts to build stuff, some neater than other. Working in the area of nuts and bolts isn't nearly as junky.

I wonder if a cool chess set could be built out of PVC plumbing supplies. You know it could. And probably already has been.

The television trilemma

Ah, the new season of TV brings us fresh new shows and seasons of old shows and it's a grand time to be a couch potato, but problems can occur.

For instance, what if you want to catch three shows on at the same time and you only have one digital video recorder? In the old days before broadband Internet connections, that would have meant buying another DVR or waiting till the summer reruns to see that third show, but no longer.

Now, thanks to most networks putting their programs online, those of us who want to watch Fringe, CSI, and Supernatural can catch any of the three online.

Thank you, Internet. Thank you, CWTV.com. Now I can get three hours of TV watching condensed from one one-hour time segment. Okay, well, gotta get my work done so I can block out some time to catch up on my future TV watching.

EDIT: Bad math aside, my Thursday fall 2009 television Thursday went this way:

I'm not watching Survivor this year; it's just gone too far to the mean-spirited side. So while recording Bones, I watched the premier of Flash Forward and found it formulaic in the beginning, ignorable in the middle, but kind of catchy toward the end, especially when the guy from Lord of the Rings and Lost showed up. Plus the hook at the end of the show really grabbed me.

At 9, while recording Fringe, I'm watching CSI, if only because it has a history of coming out the gate strong. For 10, there's only The Mentalist and his quest for Red John.

Vacation memories

It's such a beautiful day today, it reminded me of one of my days on vacation this past July when Jordan and I went to Cedar Point on Lake Erie and rode the Ferris wheel. We were way high on the ride, stopped for a while going on the side of it, the wind blowing, golden sun shining, not a care in the world for those wonderful hours. That must be one of the better reasons for vacations: remembering them through the rest of the year.