Thursday, March 17, 2011

Level Up

My birthday was yesterday, so as of this writing I am officially twenty-eight. If life was an RPG, there'd be a status message in the corner like this:

Dave reached Level 28!
+1 Wisdom
+2 Job Skills
+1 Corgi Wrangling
-1 Fortitude


As it happens, my dog Lina's birthday was on Monday. She gets a different status message:

Lina reached Level 3!
+3 Weight
+1 Serenity
+1 Courage

Lina heard a Motorbike!
-5 Courage


Shame I can't get her to unlearn that Chewing skill...

I'm cautiously optimistic about age twenty-eight. It's not thirty, so I'm still considered young in certain circles (i.e., everyone over thirty). I'd hoped to have a book published by now, or at least circulating... that hasn't happened, but I have no reason to think it won't if I keep working at it. I make a good living and I'm happy at home, thank God.

My big concerns right now are both health-related, namely my weight and my sleep. I need less of the former and more of the latter. At twenty-eight, I don't think I'm too far gone to make enough changes in my life to drop forty pounds or so; at thirty, it's going to be a hell of a lot harder. And there's a history of heart disease in my family that I'd very much like to avoid.

Exercise starts Saturday, with bowling, walking and step aerobics. The bowling is technically my birthday party, but it still counts damn it. The rest is mostly going to take place on a treadmill or a Wii Fit board, although with the weather getting warmer I might take advantage of a trail or two to get my cardio on.

Healthy eating starts Monday, after a trip to the grocery store. I've been eating out entirely too much lately, mostly from sheer laziness. It's easy, but it's expensive and it's probably killing me. So at the grocery store I'm going to reacquaint myself with fruits, vegetables, low-sodium lunchmeats, and dinner ideas that don't contain a slug-killing amount of salt.

Getting more sleep will be trickier. I do all of my fun things late at night, you see, which includes writing. But I get up damn early every morning to make the one hour commute to my office. If I'm going to get a decent amount of sleep during the week (and I'm calling six hours a night decent), I'm going to need to improve my time management skills. Or, make sure I'm so hungry and tired by 10pm that I can't even think of staying up any later.

Other than that... I've got the Black Library open submissions window to work towards in May. I've also got a trip to West Virginia lined up during that month, and my sister's graduation ceremony from law school to attend. (And I'm damn proud of her for that, let me tell you.) I've got a book to write after way too much fiddling around. Eventually I'll have Portal 2 to play. And God knows there are other things waiting in the wings that I'll never see coming.

So, here's to being twenty-eight, and hopefully reaching twenty-nine in good spirits.

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