This year, for Halloween, I was a startup unicorn. I wore my normal clothes (hoodie, t-shirt, and jeans) with a unicorn mask. I also had a thing of bubbles. I don’t think anybody got it (that I didn’t tell). Oh well.

Last night, we were out to a party on Halloween in a neighborhood that really gets into it. Next door, there was a woman who had made an amazing costume. The photo doesn’t do it justice, she must have been on stilts, and the dino head moved around. It reminded me of the viking women in Kung Fury riding the dinosaurs. I’m not sure if that’s what she was, but either way, it was impressive.

With a baby sharing our bed, the queen size was getting pretty cramped. We decided to upgrade. I had built our frame back when we were living in Boston, and it’s very sturdy. I decided that all I really needed to do was to create a platform that was the right size, using 2x4s, and that should be good enough. I was right, it worked out really well, and we continue to have a very solid bed. It only took about an hour and a half to swap out the slats.

The only problem is that with the extra space, I’ve been sleeping in an extra hour or two every morning. My morning workouts have taken a bit of a hit.

Update

I probably should mention a couple of things. First, I bought the 2x4s at Home Depot, and had them all cut to length (76”). I was originally going to use 13 2x4s and plywood on top to create a flat surface for the memory foam mattress, but the saw for plywood was broken at Home Depot. Instead, I went with 20 2x4s, with about ¹⁄₂”-³⁄₄” spacing in between. This ended up being less effort overall on my part.

This is something that I have been meaning to write about for a while. A few months ago, I built a home gym. Or, I should say that I have started building a home gym, as there still is not much in the way of equipment.

I bought a set of P90X3 DVDs, and realized that I needed a few things. While I really enjoyed the difficult workout sessions, my living room is simply not big enough to be jumping around, and doing all of the moves that they do in the program, at least not without bumping into the coffee table or television. So, I decided to look into putting together something in the unused side of our garage.

I started by laying down two 4’x6’ non-slip indoor rug pads, that you’d buy for a carpet on a hardwood floor. I bought two sets of 24”x24”x1/2” puzzle exercise mat tiles, and taped them together with Gorilla Tape. P90X has you jumping around back and forth, so the tape and non-slip mats were important to make sure that first the mat doesn’t move too much, and also to make sure that it doesn’t pull apart.

A friend of a friend had a freestanding pullup bar that he wasn’t using and said that if I came to pick it up, I could have it for free. Score!

I had some resistance bands from a couple of years ago, which are nice to start with, but I also decided to get a basic dumbbell set, this one totaled up to 40lbs. I also bought a set of push up stands, since there’s lots of pushups in the routine, and I figured that they were cheap enough. I like them, and find that I can achieve better form using them.

I also used some tape on the top of the mat to mark out a couple of parallel lines like they use in P90X. The ones shown are not final, as I replaced the white duct tape with the same gorilla tape that I used on the underside, and changed the position slightly.

All in all, I am very glad that I decided to do this. I have been able to be fairly consistent with working out every morning with a dedicated space that I enjoy working out in, that is well suited to it. It was also fairly inexpensive to put together.

As an added bonus, since I started working out regularly, I have found that I have been enjoying more and more physical activity. I really wanted to get into better shape so that I wouldn’t be suffering at roller soccer (it worked). Since I started doing P90X, I also took up surfing, freebording, and swimming. (Still not sure if I’ll end up sticking with the freebord, but that’s another story.)

Note, this post contains affiliate links to Amazon. I linked to the exact items that I bought for this project.

I was out surfing before dawn this morning, at 6am, as I usually do on Saturday mornings. The waves were bigger than expected for near low tide, since there was a bit of wind. While I wasn’t doing so well at the actual surfing, I did happen to see one sea lion, and several dolphins swimming around. I felt like that made the trip well worth it.

(Photo was taken back in early July.)

Last weekend, it was fairly hot in our area, so we took the opportunity to head to the beach. I was out surfing at Linda Mar in Pacifica at 7am, and a couple hours after returning home, we headed back there for some relaxing.

Lydia had a great time playing. It was a fun and relaxing way to spend a hot day.

I went out on my new Freebord today for the first time. A Freebord is not a skatboard. The idea is that it’s like a snowboard for the streets, I can’t attest to that quite yet, as I haven’t ever gotten good enough with it to compare the two. If you take a look at the photo, you’ll notice that it’s got six wheels, the center two are on casters, that rotate 360º, which enables you to slide on pavement and make similar maneuvers to that of a snowboard. It also has bindings on the top of the board that your shoes hook into (they’re very easy to pop out of).

I used to have a Freebord Alpha 112, which was one of their first models, when I was in either middle school or high school. I never really got good at it, because it’s meant for going downhill, which is pretty scary on a board. The thing is, I never really learned what I was doing on it, and didn’t stick with it long enough to even get comfortable on the thing.

So, I decided to pick up a new one, with the 15 years’ worth of improvements that they’ve made since my last one. It slides a bit easier than I remember, and is much, much smoother. One issue that I had was that I would frequently catch an edge, just like on a snowboard and eat it. Didn’t happen at all today. I even had my brother towing me on his bike, and while I didn’t get going too fast, I was starting to get a feel for it. I’m hoping that when I get back home, I’ll be able to work up to trying out some of the hills in Belmont and San Carlos. Either that, or I’ll either scare or injure myself and will sell this thing within a few months. We’ll see.

Oh, and this is totally going to be me:

A bit of a diversion; it’s really fun to play!

prostheticknowledge:

Sesame Street Fighter

Sesame Street meets Street Fighter in this typing game put together by cocoalasca. Created in HTML5 and Processing.js, you have to type words as fast as you can to hit the opponent, but the stronger the character, the harder the vocabulary.

Try it out for yourself here