David's Boring Blog

 It has not been a great week in some respects. I accomplished all of my daily goals, but there have been some phone-it-in level efforts. I have a stupid cold that has made exercising much less pleasant. I accept that I am going to huff and puff when I walk for a certain amount of time, but the added sinus congestion just makes the whole thing unpleasant. On the plus side, I have not let the cold symptoms including some nasty digestive distress stop me. I am pretty proud of that.  Last week I logged 7 hours, 21 minutes, and 9 seconds worth of exercise. I burned 8755 calories. I rode and walked a combined 69.73 miles all from the relative comfort of my office. I really had wanted to get out and put some actual miles on my shoe leather, but I have been pretty fair weather this year. I haven't wanted to walk in the cold. I haven't even wanted to ride my motorcycle in the cold.  I have done pretty well on my diet given that I knew I would give myself a little room to cheat for Than

Out of the box this deck is really good. I have to admit that nothing I am doing is necessary to make the deck function.   Commander Stefan, Maurer Progenitor Appropriately Strefan, Maurer Progenitor sets the tone for the rest of the deck. He is going to generate some Blood Tokens for you. I love the Blood Token mechanic. It sets this deck apart from other Vampire Commanders. He also rewards you for leaning into Blood Tokens  by giving you the option to sacrifice a pair of them to drop a Vampire from your hand tapped and attacking with the added bonus of a turn of indestructible. That is brilliant. Gross, but brilliant.  There is a temptation to drop in steady damage dealers like Dogged Pursuit to exploit getting Blood Tokens each turn. I stayed away from that personally because I have a creatureless Rakdos Enchantment/ Artifact Commander deck I am going to rebuild and write a post about.  Creature (35) 1 Timothar, Baron of Bats Dark skinned Vampire Akouma is awesome both mechanically

  I have purchased every prebuilt Magic the Gathering Commander product that has released in 2021. My Magic the Gathering addiction is in high gear going into its twenty-seventh year. I started the game with only one person to play with regularly and now I do not have a consistent in person play partner. That has not stopped me loving the game. It has simply changed the way I play it. I will say that MtG is not a game that you only play in turns. Play happens in deck design and construction. It happens in theory crafting while researching cards and interactions. I could almost even say that I have made a game out of opening packs and sorting a set into a binder. I play Magic the Gathering often and not the least part of that has been a sort of high-level mental play. The reason I have seized on Commander as my format is complicated. I love the rotating nature of the Standard metagame. One of the first things I do each morning is jump on Magic the Gathering Arena and complete my d

 I was walking on my treadmill and listening to iTunes shuffling on my computer while thinking about my Monday. I have a class to teach as soon as I log in to work this morning. I started getting a little frustrated with the gods of the shuffle playing slow jams when I realized that the music wasn't a bad thing for the pace I was setting. My sedate pace of two miles-per-hour would make a physically fit person frustrated, but I am not fit and was breathing a little hard after fifteen minutes of slow and steady walking. That was as it should be. Why, then, did I feel like I was missing something important? As I started closing out my hour of exercise for the morning I was working through my schedule mentally. I was prepared for it all in my head. Then I visualized my to-do list that hangs below my daily calendar. Oh shit, I have a blog post due today.  Next came several minutes of beating myself up for posting a status update over the weekend when nothing was due. Damn it, David, you

 I am feeling pretty proud of myself at the moment. I am writing this post as a part of the hour requirement that I will spend writing today. Writing is the last thing I need to accomplish to cap off a full week of this behavioral modification experiment. Overall it was not as painful a task as I expected it to be.  On the Exercise front I think I have done very well. I exercised seven hours and six minutes in the last seven days. Looking back that does not feel like a lot of time. I do actually feel a bit different. My pace has picked up a bit when I walk. I feel like I have lost a little weight though I have yet to invest in a scale to be sure of that. While working out in my office on the treadmill and the exercise bike I have covered 60.51 miles. That feels pretty neat.  I have to admit that the idea of covering that sort of ground makes me want to get to the point that I am on an actual bike in the near future. I would love to spend some Saturdays circling Cades Cove again. Now I

As I mentioned before, the key to my behavioral modifications (exercising daily, writing, drawing, and not spending money) lies in the system that I designed for myself to make it happen. The first thing I added to the mixture was a bit of instant gratification in the form of dropping different colored glass beads in a mason jar.  I chose this system for a couple of reasons. First, I already had plenty of jars thanks to my Mom's love of canning, and I had plenty of glass beads used for counters for Magic the Gathering and boardgames. I didn't have to go out of my way to get started. I am not exactly lazy, but the easier it is for me to get started on something the more likely I am to do so without procrastination. Would I have liked to used marbles? Kind of. Marbles are cool. I just didn't have marbles in a big one gallon ziploc bag that were just begging to be sorted out the way I did glass beads. Two birds one stone.  Is this the most visibly appealing system I could have

 I have been saying for more than a decade now that it is super important that I lose a significant amount of weight. I have made progress and lost it. I have slimmed down and plumped back up. It has felt like a never ending cycle and I have spent quite a bit of time trying to think through all of the factors that play a part in my failure to make important changes.  I have been writing fiction since I was about 14 years old. I have characters and plot lines drifting around my grey matter most of the time. I enjoy writing. I enjoy journaling. I enjoy blogging. Once upon a time I took great pride in the fact that my blog went all the way back to 2005. While plotting out exactly how often I posted I realized that most years I averaged less than 2 posts per month. In reality, just like this blog, I was prone to post several times consecutively within the span of a few days or at most a few weeks and then go silent for weeks or even months at a time. My fiction writing happens at about the