what I've been working on this evening...

the past few weeks have been surprisingly freelance free (I imagine it's mostly because of the Christmas season). Two of my clients had projects this week so I've gone back to being a slave to the machine. That's a good thing though because I need to catch up on my taxes and after that we need to throw the money at getting out of debt. Man, adulthood is so exciting. heh. 

Anyway, in lieu of an in-depth post, I thought I'd post some of what I was working on tonight. It's an identity piece for an Austin chili cook-off. My original thought was to have the cowboy riding a kidney bean... but then I realized that that would be sacrilege in Texas. Digging around chili cook off websites I noticed that a lot of them used chili pepper iconography instead of a bowl of chili. New thoughts went through my head and I thought for the "Boots and Hats Chili Cook Off" I might throw a cowboy on top of a big chili pepper.

Round one had the initial combining of the pieces. It was determined that it was probably a good idea but that the chili pepper looked way too placid... it needed to be bucking like some kind of chili pepper rodeo... 

I went back and did some editing and threw in the fire... suddenly we had "El Rodeo de Chili Diablo"... kind of cool, but pretty busy. 

Round three introduced a spoon into our Chili Cowboy's hand. What's better for rustling chilis than a wooden spoon? This round also introduced the text. Since the warp tools in photoshop are better than the text warping tools in Illustrator, I layed my text out there and then went to LAYER --> TYPE --> CONVERT TO SHAPE and then copied the newly outlined text and pasted it into Illustrator. Suddenly, quite easily, I had text in Illustrator that I could mess around with. I spent some time trying to figure out how to separate the red shadow on the text from the main lettering (it was part of the same font) and made some letter spacing and sizing changes. 

Version 4 (officially version 3) 

Some of the people I showed it to thought that the cowboy looked to be a little too hunchbacked. I dug up some other cowboy illustrations and experimented with a slightly different pose. I think this one is actually a little bit stronger. The spoon has moved into this cowboys other hand and is partially hiding behind his head. I think it's kind of a cool, subtle effect. 

Finally, this is a guess as to how the final ad will be put together. It's just a draft at the moment and a lot of the other text that will eventually be there isn't... but for a few hours work, I think this is kind of cool. I think my favorite part is that it's pretty different from all my other work. 

I'd love to know your thoughts. I'm going to be making final changes in the morning. If you have any feedback, I'd welcome it. 

More later. 

Day 20

Yesterday it was making note of three weeks left. Today, let's consider the fact that I'm halfway there. Thank heaven. Although we'll see whether it's easier to count down than count up. February 4 is day 40. I turn 30 the 7th. I didn't get a chance to jog yesterday, couldn't find the access card. I had freelance to work on anyway. More freelance is coming in today, it's going to be a busy week.

More later.

Day 19

Three weeks left. That's kind of heartening. Three more Mondays. Three more Tuesdays. Put in that perspective, I think this is going to get easier. It hasn't been extraordinarily hard, but getting closer to the half way point, I think it will be much easier as I start counting down.

I know I've talked about the spiritual struggles with this, and I still struggle with that, but at this point I have to admit that for me, I guess it's become a bit of a challenge, like I'm relying on myself and testing myself to see if I can do it. That's probably not the healthiest thing.

I don't think I posted it, but there was a chunk in Messy Spirituality that really spoke to me.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I sat across the table from a woman we highly respect, a deeply spiritual lady who had profoundly impacted our lives. This woman spent most of her life resisting the noise and activity of the world to seek God in silence and solitude. She had spent hundreds of weeks in silent retreat. This was a woman so saturated with her faith, you could almost smell God when she came into the room.
We were talking about prayer. "It's embarrassing to be sitting with you," I blurted. "You spend days, weeks, even months in prayer. I'm lucky if I spend ten minutes. Compared to you, I'm not very spiritual, I'm afraid."
Her eyes, flashing with anger, caught mine, and she fired back, "Oh, Mike, knock it off. First of all, you don't spend every day with me. You don't know me at all. You are comparing what you know about yourself to what you don't know about me. Secondly, I battle depression daily, and it has won during several periods of my life. I never told you about it. I don't have a family; I like to be alone and silent. Trust me, I am just as 'unspiritual' as you are."
Then she said gently, "You think about God all the time, right?"

"Well, sort of," I said.

"Thinking about God is being with God. Being with God is spirituality. Thinking about God is praying. So shut up with this guilt stuff; you have been praying most of your life! You are a spiritual person!"

What? I've been praying most of my life? What was she talking about? It never occurred to me that Paul's "pray without ceasing" might actually be possible. It never occured to me that praying could include thinking, that praying could be done with my eyes open, that praying could be done standing, sitting, driving, dancing, skiing, lying down, jogging, working. How could anyone accuse me of praying all the time when I didn't pray all the time... unless my friend was right, unless I was praying without ceasing.

How could anyone accuse me of being spiritual unless spirituality comes in unlimited shapes and sizes, unless spirituality looks like whatever you and I look like when we're thinking about Jesus, when we are trying to find Jesus, when we are trying to figure out what real Christianity looks like in the real world?

Spirituality looks like whatever you and I look like when we're thinking about Jesus, when we are trying to find Jesus, when we are trying to figure out what real Christianity looks like in the real world.

That encourages me. It says to me that I'm not crazy. It wraps Christianity up into my life in a way that Karl Barth and John Shelby Spong never did in the Contemporary Theology course I had to take back at Augsburg a few years ago. (I'll honestly admit that while a good part of the reason I failed that course was because of everything going on in my life at the time, I had a hard time dealing with the subject matter in a way that it probably deserved. I had a lot of derision for the professor, and she of me. Apparently she wasn't fond of the Lutheran church I grew up in, and I wasn't too fond of the Lutheran church she went to where they had just installed a lesbian pastor. I REALLY don't want to go there, so don't dig into it, it's just a statement of what was going on at the time.


Anyway, I feel like even if I don't have all the answers, God is listening and understanding that I'm a mess and can work through me anyway. If that's the only thing I learn during this fast, I think that sense of 'being' is more than enough.

Weight this morning. 229. I thought my gastro-intestinal issues were gone yesterday but they came back this morning. We'll see how long they last. I'm guessing it went away because I didn't drink any of the V8 Fusion juice yesterday and I think the additional fiber in that was acting correctively. I'll drink some more of it tonight.

Day 18 pt 1: Numbers...

Today's weight? 230

Miles walked last night: 2.31

Calories Expended: 396.4

Average Heartrate: 163

Time: 35 minutes

Water consumed last night: half gallon


I can't think of many more numbers to throw out there. I feel pretty good this morning. A little tired, but that's mostly because we had friends over. We watched The Lookout and The Usual Suspects last night. Surprisingly Nate and Angela had never seen The Usual Suspects. We turned off To Live and Die in LA and switched right over to their first experience with Kaiser Soze. What a great movie The Usual Suspects is.

I'm going to go grab some juice and my multivitamin and head out the door. I hate early mornings. Oh well. There's talk of moving to a bi-weekly Monday-Friday, Sunday-Thursday shift. The cool thing about that would be that every other weekend I'd vary between one day off and three days off. I kind of like the idea of a three day weekend every two weeks. We'll see. We're still talking about it. It would be nice to ride down to the Sunday afternoon club ride without being sleep deprived though. That's one of the reasons I've kind of fallen off the cycling wagon... a really weird schedule on Sundays.

Anyway, more later.

My Goals For the Year...

Angela and her friend headed off to the hot tub so I'm going to steal a few minutes and write about what I'd like to accomplish fitness wise this year. 

Last year, my cycling was almost non-existent. I rode one century, not even making it the whole way (here's the elevation profile if you're curious)

This ride SERIOUSLY kicked my ass. Basically, heading out of Buena Vista at 8,000 ft, you climb 2,000 ft over the first 20-30 miles. You get a little rest, then you continue heading up into Leadville. It was one of the more painful experiences in my life. 

One: because my friend Russell ditched me, wanting to climb faster. 

Two: because even though I'd gotten SOME miles under me, I didn't have nearly enough climbing miles in my legs.

Three: I got a really bad rash on my posterior just outside of town and had to stop riding every few hundred meters because my ass was on fire. It sucked. It sucked even more when, upon arriving at the first rest stop, Russell asked me "what took so long". It's been a long time since I've wanted to punch someday. He almost got punched that day. 

After short-cutting the climb into Leadville, we had lunch and turned back around. If there was anything about the ride that made all of the pain worthwhile, it was the view of the collegiate peaks we had on the way back to Buena Vista

On the way down it should be obvious that the wind picked up and negated any downhill advantage I may have had. It should also be obvious that if there's any time for something mechanically to happen to my bike it should be when I'm going downhill. In this case, I lost the cabling to my rear derailleur... I had a hard nasty gear or a way too easy gear. Did I mention that it sucked? 

Also (mostly because I have panoramas left I haven't posted), I should mention that Ang neglected to bring any cold-weather camping gear with her, meaning that I had to give her mine. So, starting the day century morning, I was absolutely freezing. I should also mention that I hardly slept all night because the area we were camping in had a raging snow-melt fueled creek less than a 100 yards away. All night long we were treated to a cacophony of bubbling, gurgling, creek sounds. It was probably as bad a situation as it could have been. 

All of that goes to say, I really want to go back there this year and kick the century rides ass. I REALLY want to ride that thing and make it my slave. Sense some century ride animosity? I thought you might. 

I also want to ramp up my running. Assuming we don't move this year, I'd like to do the list of Colorado Springs Grand Prix races

Long Series - Series runners must run 1 5K, 3 10Ks, and the 5Mile.
5K on St Patrick's Day (March 15)
Garden of the Gods 5Miler (May 3)
Sailin' Shoes 10K (June 21)<>

and maybe a half marathon or two. I haven't looked them up, but I'd like to at least do one this summer. Assuming I'm in town (events seem to conspire against me every year) I want to do the Red Rock Canyon century again this year. Russell and I did it a couple of years ago and it was a great century ride. I'm looking forward to getting back to it.