They brought the flooring boxes by yesterday, and my wife couldn't control herself. She had to open them up and make sure she still loved them.
Doesn't matter if she now absolutely hates them. It's too late to turn back. She did still love them, though, so at least there's that.
I can't wait to get the floors down and start getting back to normality. I really, really hate to be at my house right now.
The number one exercise for promoting longevity is...
Walking.
If you can walk, you'll last longer than those that can't, or don't. Walking helps maintain the muscle tone needed to not fall and break your hip.
I'm still a long way from needing to worry about longevity yet, but it's a good exercise, especially to get started. You don't have to be starting out, like me though. Shawn Baker, who is known as the guy who popularized the carnivore diet, and looks like this:
Still goes for a walk every day. So, it's not just for out of shape guys who can't do more.
However, I am still an out of shape guy, and I need something more simple to get started.
So far, even though I've been eating right since March 15th thanks to the help of Marshal Latham, I haven't done much in the way of exercise. I thought it might be a good idea to change that, so today, I went out and took a walk on the greenbelt trails around my house.
I've said it before, but I absolutely love the greenbelt trails here. The vegetation out there is so lush that you can barely see the houses behind it. I could easily believe that I was walking one of the more manicured trails at a national park. It's a great thing to have access to.
I'm going to do my best to keep this up. I'd like to take a walk every day. I'm sure that it won't always work, and I'm not going all crazy about it like I did when I was trying the 75 Hard thing, but I'm going to push for that achievement as much as I will toward writing every day and eating right.
I'll see if I can't bring my good camera out and get some cool pictures of birds and stuff. I saw a particularly cool looking bird today with a really bright beak. It would have been a picture worth sharing if I'd found it.
I also may see what I can do to combine my goals. If I take my phone, and talk into the recorder, I can write while walking. Now that'd be some good stuff, right?
I'm sure some of the folks that I pass will look at me a little funny, but what do I care? I don't know those people, so it's not like I'll lose their friendship for being weird. I've seen plenty of people talking on their phone as they walked. This wouldn't be much different...except when I'm narrating a murder scene or a sex scene or...well, maybe I'll just pause when I pass people if I'm doing something like that.
Yesterday, I mentioned the Boba Fett figure that I found at Target. If you read that one, you might have noticed in the package photos that the figure has a coin that comes with it.
It's another homage to the eighties. The last of the original Star Wars figures came with collector coins too, and they're just aping that to try to drum up nostalgia in us old nerds and motivate us to buy the figures.
Rish sent me a link to an eBay auction where somebody sold the coin for almost $10. If that's possible, then maybe buying this guy wasn't such a ripoff after all.
Either I'll do that, or I'll take the coin to a store, and see what the reaction is when I try to pay with it. That might be more fun, seeing the clerk look at the coin and say, "What the hell is this? Boba Fett, Bounty Hunter. Are you seriously trying to pay with that?
I walked into Target the other day, not expecting to find anything good, because most days I don't.
I walked past the spot where they have the Droids cartoon tribute figures. It's a set of three figures, Artoo, Threepio, and Boba Fett.
They're made to look like the way they were colored in the old eighties cartoon, and they're not terrible, but they're not great. I've considered buying them, because they look like astromech and protocol droids that are similar to, but are not, Artoo and Threepio.
I'd be even more likely to grab the Boba Fett, because he's the same. He looks like a Mandalorian that is similar to, but is not, Boba Fett. And I kind of really like the pastel coloration on him. I could dig on that.
Mostly, though, I figured I wouldn't buy them, because they are Target exclusives, and Target wants $15.99 for them, which is several dollars more than any other Vintage Collection figure costs, and I've seen Vintage Collection figures on sale for as little as $9.99. Why would I pay so much more for a goofy paint job?
Didn't seem to matter, because the only one they ever had was Artoo anyway. The peg has always been full of Artoos, about ten of them, from front to back. No Threepio, no Boba Fett.
So, as I walked past, I looked up to see if that had changed, and it hadn't. All Artoos all the way back. There was one figure down below that someone had left on the shelf instead of hanging it back up on the peg, and a peculiar thing that toy collectors tend to do is putting things back where they belong. I don't know why we tend to do that, but we do.
So, I grabbed that Artoo and went to put it on the peg with the others. Then I looked closer at what was in my hand and saw that it didn't match. It had the same Droids logo at the top, but this was Boba Fett.
I was surprised. I didn't see any Threepio anywhere. It was still just Artoos...and one lone Boba Fett. Weird, but, despite the fact that they were going to gouge me for this guy at the register, I decided I would buy it.
I took it out to the car and ripped it open, which is my tradition. I put its gun in its hand and put on its backpack, and set it up on the dashboard in a cool pose and took a picture to send to Rish.
In my old car, the space on the dash was flat, and sometimes the figures would stand there for a long time while I drove around. The new car has a slanted space on the dash, though, so they always fall over immediately, but I still set them up there and start driving.
When I got him home, I got a couple nicer pictures.
It's a good looking figure, but it really needs a blackwash to look more like a real figure and less like a figure made to go with a cartoon.
I put him with his Mandalorian friend that I bought a week ago.
My Mandalorian collection is already growing.
I also posed him with the other figure that I got last week.
These guys will look pretty darn good walking the streets of Ankletown Station. I love it.
In my post about day two, I mentioned how I hadn't been able to achieve as many words that day than I had the day before. Well, that became a trend for me.
The next day was day Sunday. I had to work (it's the fourth Sunday in a row I've had to work, and I'm guessing I'll probably have one more before it's all done). I usually do my writing during my lunch break at work, however today work was a little crazier than usual. I worked right up to the very last second to get everything finished in time, and had only a few minutes to write after it was all over.
So, my word count came down a little further. This time it was only 320. Three days, and each day it has been less. That's probably not a good sign.
It wasn't over, though. The next day was the Fourth of July, and again, I was at work. You'd think that things would be easier on a holiday, but not this time. They made the show as intense as they could, and made me all the more bitter that I was there working and not off enjoying myself like the majority of the country.
I had even less time than the day before to write, and on top of that I felt like absolute garbage. I had a horrible headache, and it made me just want to curl up in a ball and die. So, I only wrote a tiny amount, 228 words.
But, that was something. It was still something. I didn't just skip it. I wrote something. That's really what my goal is this month. The goal is to get in the habit of writing every day. Next month I'll worry about hitting a certain daily word count.
So, even though it was a couple of days of disaster, it was a great victory. And I'm going to keep it up.
Here's how it's going so far toward my goal. I've made it to a half of a percent! Woohoo.
Just after I picked up Fennec Shand the other day, I went to the next store and found Bo-Katan Kryze on the pegs. Better yet, she was on sale. She comes from the same wave of figures as Fennec Shand, but there were no Fennecs to be seen, so at least I didn't pay more than I had to.
Like Fennec Shand, Bo-Katan comes with an unmasked head as well as her helmet, and similarly they are both actual heads rather than helmets that fit over the figure's head.
Which gives me a Katee Sackhoff head that I can put onto someone else if I want to. We'll see if I find something to do that with. Again, I suspect that it might be a Fortnite character.. Maybe I ought to try it out on one of those cat bots that I have four of...hmm...
This is my first Mandalorian character I've managed to obtain...if you don't count the 5POA Boba Fett that came with the ship that I bought back in 2017 at a Ross in Channelview while we were living in a hotel waiting to move into our own house here in Houston. I don't really count that, because he has a place on the sand skiff that I display on my normal shelves.
That's kind of surprising, considering how Mandalorian crazy Star Wars has become, but then again, I just started collecting this scale, so I guess it's not that surprising.
I'm not crazy about the character, and Rish has me basically convince that she is a villain, but she has a pretty good look. It would be fun to have a cadre of Mandalorians walking around on Ankletown Station. I do think Rish might be right. It does seem like sooner or later Din Djaron and Bo-Katan Kryze are destine to have to fight for the Dark Saber. I guess we'll see how they handle that to find out if she is evil or not.
I guess today is a good day to post this one.
Happy Fourth of July, folks.
I found these two figures at Ross recently. I got the red, white, and blue bear, Fireworks Team Leader, because I get anything that would make a good decoration for a holiday out of a toy.
And I got the banana man, Peely, because I thought it would be funny if there was a restaurant on Ankletown Station that is manned completely by creatures that are actually the same as the food itself. There's a few other ones, like Beef Boss, Tomatohead, and Guaco that I'd also like to get for that same reason. If I ever come across them for a similarly cheap price, I'll pick them up too.
