It snowed this week so Otis & I played a friendly game of fetch.


Otis was no match for me on his home turf and at his game.  Watty was official thrower and I won 3 out of 4.  I admit that I play dirty and tackled Otis once and boxed him out another time.  It never said no tackling or boxing out in the rule book.

Last Week's Goals & Actions:
* Improve programming skills and finance/business knowledge for work
   * Read 150 more pages of the ASP.Net 3.5 book
   * Read two articles daily on various technical topics
   * Created 1drc application with ASP.Net 3.5 for next week's demo

* Stay fit and healthy
   * 2 days of strength work last week and getting stronger
   * Racquetball 3 days last week
   * Ran 4 times for 12 miles total for the week

* Be a great husband and (soon to be) father
   * Cooked dinner a couple of times (improve cooking skills goal)
   * Movie night with Jen
   * Finished reading the Baby Care Book
   * Started reading the Baby Whisperer book (100 pages down)
   * Looked into painting a mural on the baby room walls
   * Looked into vacation ideas for early September for our 10 year anniversary

* Improve handyman skills
   * Put up the framing for the other side of the deck
   * Worked with Watty to clean up his back yard

* Nurture and improve relationships with family, old friends, and new friends
   * Worked on the deck with Watty
   * Helped Watty clear out his back yard
   * Played racquetball with James, lifted with Mike G., and ran with the Tuesday group

Recap:
I'm finding that even though I'm not training 20+ hrs a week anymore I still end up staying quite busy.  My time is just spread out amongst a variety of different things vs. concentrated on swimming, biking, and running.  I'm still enjoying my new schedule and don't miss the triathlon lifestlye one bit.

A lot of our attention is being put towards trying to get everything set for our baby girl to come in March.  One issue that we have is that we don't have a whole lot of space for all of the baby gear in our side of the duplex.  It's a 2BR/1BA place with 3 levels including a basement but the basement is used for training Jen's clients and all of our exercise gear and bikes.  For the time being, I'm going to look into buying or building some space efficient storage for the baby room and our bedroom and finishing the deck will also give us more space as well.  I would like two children some day (Jen wants to see how one goes first) so at that point we'll have a bit of an issue with space.  We'll then be faced with two options:

1. Move back into our Highland Creek house (4BR/2.5BA) and sell our half of the duplex and continue to rent the other half.
2. Turn the duplex into a single family home and stay there.

We really like the dilworth area so it would be nice to turn the duplex into a single family home but we would be way better off financially to sell the 1/2 of the duplex and move back into the Highland Creek house.  We'd essentially have no mortgage payment.  On the flip side I would have to commute from the University Area to Uptown for work and most of Jen's clients and activities are in the dilworth area.  I can't stand wasting time by sitting in traffic so that has to be taken into consideration.  The good thing is that we have a couple of years to think things through and see how things shake out.

Along those same lines I think we've got the family visitation schedule solidified for when the baby arrives.  Due to space we can only have one visitor at a time so Jen's parents are coming in for a couple of weeks in March, my sister Melissa & hub Tony are coming in after them in late March to early April, and my parents are coming in for a couple of weeks after M&T head back home.  It will be nice to see everyone and have an extra set or two of hands for the first 6 weeks.  Jen and I are starting to feel more confident about our gameplan for when the baby arrives.  We're on the same page and I'm sure we'll work well as a team....as usual.

I tried my hand at the challenge court on Saturday morning and got beat 2 games to none (15-9, 15-13) by a racquetball vet named Bo.  I was quicker than he was but he just waited for me to make mistakes and took advantage of them.  Looks like I need to go back to the drawing board and try to bring a little more strategy and finesse into my game because right now I'm basically just a ground and pound player.

Next Week's Activities:
* Application Demo at work
* Read Baby Whisperer book
* Baby Shower
* Super Bowl
* Braces Off and finalized!!
* Movie night
* Cook some dinners
* Stay active