Week Off

Well, it's clear I haven't spent my week of writing journal entries! D'oh!

2002 has been a mixed year, it seems. Several folks I know have had awful ones, while others have had very pleasant ones, accomplishing some long-time goals. For me, it's just sort of been mixed.

I've settled nicely into my house, and so have the cats. Though I've dragged my feet on getting some new furniture for it (I really need a new couch), getting pictures framed, or developing my garden.

I bought a new bicycle, which I've enjoyed a lot, but my efforts at losing weight have stalled all year. I clearly need to devote more time and effort to exercising, and/or eat less. After three-and-a-half years of exercising, I'm slimmer, but I weigh just as much as I did back then.

The pace of my reading has slacked off, and I still haven't made much effort at all at writing fiction.

Dad came to visit me, and we had a great time. I also went to Worldcon, where I also had a great time.

We had some organizational shake-ups at work (such as my boss deciding to head to pastures that are not so much greener, as a lot closer to his house), and those are always something of a struggle for those involved. On the other hand, I still enjoy my job and I'm looking forward to the projects we have on tap for 2003.

Debbi and I have been together for over a year and a half now. Hard to believe! We've met each other's families and continue to have fun together. And, she helped me put up Christmas lights!

So, some good, some not-so-good. 2003 can definitely be a better year, but 2002 hasn't been particularly unkind to me.

My friend John gave me a dining table.

It's an old dining table, nearly 30 years old according to some stamped dates on the underside of its top surface. Its chairs badly need to be refinished (I wonder where I can do that?), but otherwise it's in pretty good shape. Certainly nicer than the "urban curb" table I've had for the last eight years. He gave it to me when he moved in November, and it's been sitting in a closet for the last month. This past weekend Debbi and I went to buy the necessary screws to put it together.

This turned out not to be hard, although we got faked out the first time and bought screws that were too long, as it turns out the table's base had recessed holes for the screws which we didn't notice until we flipped everything upside-down. (Unfortunately, we ended up getting into an argument about the screws, which made Sunday afternoon kind of a downer. I tend to get worked up when I feel I'm not communicating something well, and Debbi became angry when I raised my voice, and felt that I wasn't listening to her.)

Anyway, we did eventually put it together, and I bought a simple green tablecloth for it yesterday. (I'd been open to buying a fancier tablecloth, but it turned out that I couldn't easily find many tablecloths for the size of table I have - probably because many of them had sold out over the holidays.) It looks quite nice, and it has some leaves so I can make it pretty darned big if I want to have a larger group over for gaming.

It's a nice step up. Now I just need to get that couch...

I finished off the regular football season with a football "trifecta", winning both my football pools and the "super bowl" of our fantasy league.

I'm most pleased with winning the pool run by an old friend who brought me into fantasy baseball nine years ago. I won that league the first year, too, so he'll probably never let me into anything he runs ever again! It's a ranked pool, where you assign points to each of your picks each week, and it was a very close race.

At the other end, the fantasy league was a lot of fun, but I'm not really sure I feel that I "won" it. It involved 14 weeks of "head-to-head" fantasy games, and then 3 weeks of playoffs. Since we only had 8 people, everyone made the playoffs, which meant pretty much anyone could win regardless of what happened during the first 14 weeks (this is one reason I hate many-tiered playoffs in real sports; it's lame that more than a third of NFL teams go to the playoffs). I finished third in the regular season, and the woman who finished first - Debbi's youngest sister - pretty much crushed everyone. As far as I'm concerned, she was the real league champion.

I enjoyed setting up a spreadsheet to make my football picks each week, and I look forward to refining the approach I used for next year.

All that said, there's less than 2 months until spring training!

Happy New Year everybody.