I Love This Sport

Chess boxing has a new champ. Long live Chess boxing.

New Photos

OK, I've obviously been real lax about all my hobbies over the last few months. Anyway, if you want about a year's worth of photos (not much actually this year) go over to my photos page or check out the new galleries directly here and here. Also, Ilissa always has the her latest photos on her Flickr page. Enjoy.

The Handyman Vibe

In NY, I never had any desire to do anything handy. Nothing. My house was a small, simple townhouse with almost no outside to maintain save 14 linear feet of frontage and 14 linear feet of, uh, backage (?). I could hang a picture and that was about it.

I kind of felt that I might go that way down here in NC too. But something has gradually changed in me since we moved down here. I actually want to learn how to maintain, fix, or upgrade my home. Here, I have a lot of house to play with, and a lot of yard to enjoy. Part of it may be that I am tired of paying people to do things I can learn to do. Part of it may be that I feel this home is more permanent than my last one.

Whatever the reason, I now find myself lustily reading through tool catalogs. I have ideas for using space. I mow my own lawn and maintain the equipment. I laid out a gravel bed for a shed and built it myself from a kit. Heck, I even made my own pipe tampers from a tree I pruned.

Of course there are still things I'd rather pay experts for, or teams of people. Why do something that I will likely screw up, or take on an incredibly labor-intensive task when it isn't too expensive to have a team of guys do it? But more and more I find that I want to be handy and do things myself. Maybe it's part of the spirit of this place.