Technically, I still have 2 days left of Spring Break, but I’m mostly going to be writing and trying to rest up for the week.  It’s going to be a weird period of time going fast and slow at the same time until summer.  Might be easier to wrap my head around since I’m aiming to work this summer.  Then again, this is also my son’s last year of middle school.  He’ll be an official high schooler in September.  Time really is flying by.

This break wasn’t as relaxing as I’d hoped.  How could it be?  The first four days involved Passover, a friend’s son’s birthday, my birthday, Easter, The Dungeons & Dragons movie, and The Super Mario Movie.  As much as I had hoped to get a little writing or July blog prep time in, that wasn’t in the cards.  My son and I stayed up late most nights watching cartoons too.  I was barely able to do my biking.  Before I knew it, my son had to go to his mom’s and I was left with Darwin & the Demon Game.

Well, that isn’t exactly true.  One thing I didn’t expect is that a bunch of appointments turned up.  Most of them were for my son, but I don’t skip those for anything less than a medical emergency.  Writing can wait when parenting calls.  Of course, this meant a bunch of ex-wife encounters and my writing time going from 3 sections a day to 2.  I’m noticing that it’s typically going that way.  Not regretting it though because it means I get to see my son a little each day.

So, how far did I get with Darwin & the Demon Game?  Counting today and tomorrow, I will have finished chapters 11-14.  That leaves 3 chapters to go, which I can finish in 4 days if I pull off 3 sections a day.  6 if it’s the usual 2.  Maybe I’ll avoid pushing this so hard because I need to get the July blog posts ready.  Tuesdays and Thursdays are set, but the rest have to be carefully crafted to help promote Do I Need to Use a Dragon? and the 99 cents sale.  Darwin taking until the end of May wouldn’t be a bad thing if I can get that other issue off my plate.  Probably won’t tackle Darwin & the Beast Collector until June when I can write a bit on weekdays.

Going back to the biking part, I am proud of doing better with that.  I hope I can keep it up, but I see some rough patches coming in May.  There are a lot of birthdays and events that take away my weekends, which are the best times for me to bike.  Doing a 20/20/30 minute split throughout the week is good though.  The first two are feasible on weekdays even when I work.  The third is a weekend push to the end when I have more time.  My legs are still aching a lot from this, but it isn’t severe pain.  I’m staying within 15-18 mph level, which means this counts as heavy exercise.  Is it helping me lose weight?  Doesn’t seem to be doing that, but my diet hasn’t changed as much as it should.  It doesn’t help that all of the diet suggestions I’m hit with cause me to stress out when food shopping, see something wrong with everything I consider buying, and cause me to go home with nothing for lunch.  Seriously, it’s either too much sodium, too much fat, too much sugar, not enough protein, too much protein, has carbs, does not have carbs, has fruit, does not have fruit, and the list goes on.  Stresses me out to the point where I stress eat, which defeats the purpose of it all.

Not much else to talk about with this week.  Saw some great movies with my son.  I didn’t do a lot of TV.  My friend convinced me to binge a British mockumentary series on Netflix called ‘Cunk on Earth’.  It was amusing, but I think I’d have liked it better if I didn’t binge it because I became numb to the dry humor.  I went on to an anime called ‘Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works’.  I’ve seen other series in this franchise.  I’m noticing how the stories seem to be pretty similar.  Not that this is boring since the characters and subplots differ, but the overall story seems to be hitting the same notes.  I don’t know what I’m going to jump to next, but I’ll probably need a new series by next weekend.

Speaking of next weekend, the public library here is doing an anime/comics/video game convention.  It’s a yearly thing and I’ve got my son for it, which means his Soul King Brook costume is going to be unleashed.  Maybe he’ll even enter the cosplay contest that they have on Sundays.  I’ll have to see how he handles the costume because the wig still makes him itchy if he has it on for too long.  Should be a nice bit of fun after our first week back from break too.  Although, he gets Eid off on Friday and I don’t.  Kids really have it made some times.

This is who he’ll be dressed as:

Soul King Brook from One Piece

Goals of the week?

1. Get my son and myself back into work/school mode.
2. Write some Darwin & the Demon Game if possible.
3. Prepare July blog posts.
4. Biking.
5. Work on puzzles.
6. Read more Naruto.
7. Finally decide on what to spend my birthday money on.
8. Sleep when possible.
9. EM-CON!
10. Try to be more interesting for next Saturday.