Plowing the carpet

I have callouses on my fingers. Even with gloves, they still develop.  I think of them in a joking way as a badge of honor.

So, it's been about three weeks since I started rowing every day - just 10 minutes to start with, though I've been ramping up the resistance.  I'm definitely getting broader in the chest, but that's not necessarily saying much: this is the first time in my life when my chest hasn't been defined primarily by my ribcage.  At this point, I'm going to start increasing the duration bit by bit, working my way up to a 20-minute session hopefully; most of what I've read puts this as the practical "cap" for even extremely-fit people.

And, yes, by "every day" I mean every day.  I've long tried to abide by the "work a single muscle group once or twice a week" method, and while I've had some results with that over the years, it's never really worked well.  This is showing a significant amount of improvement in a relatively short period of time.  I doubt it will progress as quickly in the future, but I'm off to a decent start already.

(Just for the record, this is what I have.)

So far, I haven't changed my diet at all, but I'm losing a little bit of weight (with the extra mass and calories burnt, that's not unreasonable).  I figure I'll keep this up until the end of February, give or take, and then start working a little more on eating better.  I doubt I'll be in any condition to go to the white party (which is 3/31), but I'll hopefully be pretty well off by my birthday at the end of June.

... Oh, right, birthday.  Just booked my annual pilgrimage to Hawaii. This time, I'll be spending 7 days just south of Kona before heading to my usual spot on Maui for the 4th of July (and a few days after).  This'll be the first time in years that I haven't been on Maui for my birthday, but I'm a little conflicted about the changes they made to the resort: they look decent, but I don't know how they'll play out in experiencing them.  We'll see.  They also jacked the prices up a fair bit (like, 20-30%), so that's a consideration as well: I'm spending more on 4 nights in Maui that I'm spending for 7 in Kona.

I also had to do the flights in 3 separate reservations to minimize the number of miles I'm spending, but I'm basically getting first-class fights from LAX to Kona, Kona to Maui, and Maui back to LAX for a less than $400 total.  Looks like all those years of booking my own business travel at the last company were actually useful.

Uhm, dating-wise, nothing in a while.  No worries on that - I don't think I'm the kind of guy most guys are looking for.  Doesn't hurt to leave the page up, though.

Finally, best-friend's wife is preggers (yay!) but not necessarily doing well (boo!) - she already miscarried once, a year ago or so, so they're really worried about this one.  But, as a result, he's really thinking about getting a job closer to home (he's about an hour away now).  There'll likely be fallout from that, but oh well.  We'll manage.