Activesteve.com is Born…

Hey gang, well, as the title implies, for me at least, Christmas has more or less came and went. Jody and I decided to celebrate Christmas before she left for BC to spend time with her family. Yup, that’s right, Jonah and I will be bachelors over the Christmas break. Well, by break, I mean a couple days. I decided not to take any holidays this year, and am instead saving my pennies and time for when I might really need them. Hopefully it doesn’t mean I won’t be relaxing, but I’ll still be going in to the office to keep up with what’s gong on, and clean up my office for the new year. The last month or so has been pretty hectic for me it seems. Now, I strive on being busy, but I see I haven’t really posted much lately to keep everyone up to speed. So, I’ll try and rectify that a bit right now.

Howdy folks! I’m sure if you’re reading this post, you’re expecting me to be writing about my latest race result, right? Well, much as I’d like to jump the gun and get right to it, I’m still a couple posts behind, so rather than just skip them, I’m forcing myself to at least write a few paragraphs on a couple things that happened before this weekend 🙂 As you’re no doubt aware, I’ve been doing a lot of training lately in preparation for my Iron distance triathlon. However, in the last few weeks of training for any big event, you’re supposed to do what’s called a taper, which is when you reduce you’re training volume. So this post and the next are about what I did during that taper. It’s important to make sure that you take some time to recover and get yourself mentally prepared for the big race! Read on to hear about what I did a few weeks back.

Well, another weekend has gone by, and what a busy one it was. Love of my life Jody has finally caught up to me as far as decades go. Yup, Jody has joined the masters club by turning 30 last week. The celebrating started on Thursday, and didn’t stop until Sunday night. What a lucky lady! As a result of my second job, I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to spend Thursday evening with Jody, so she made her own plans. She chose to take the bus to the cosmopolitan city of Montreal for the day. Personally, I don’t see how the shopping is any better in Montreal, but apparently the ladies see it another way. She had a full day there, and even made it back in time for us to watch Survivor. Then it was off to bed early to get ready for a fun weekend. Jody actually opted to take both Thursday and Friday off, to properly give herself time to get used to the idea of being 30. Sadly, I had to toil away in the salt mines at work, then go home and put in extra time on the laptop, even on Friday. Such is life though.

I just had a look at the last time I posted anything on the bar project, and realized that I’m way overdue. Last posting was January 16th!! My apologies to all my loyal readers 🙂 Although things haven’t been steady, I have definitely made a lot of progress since the last update. I had to first go out and buy a router table, and then put it to extremely good use by routing all of the various pieces for the bar. Who knew cabinet making was such labour-intensive work? I can definitely appreciate why custom-built cabinets cost big bucks. Every step along the way has unique challenges. In the picture to the right, I’m holding up a couple of my favourite examples of routed wood. These pieces are for the cabinet doors. I’m not even sure of what all the steps were called for those pieces. I think I did some rabbets, mortises, tenons, and even some radiusing. Of course, when it’s all done, to you, it’ll just look like a cabinet door. To me however, I’ll remember that at the onset, it was a rough piece of 1×6 Clear Red Oak, 8 feet long, and some 1/4″ Oak plywood! There’s a certain satisfaction in doing something all by myself from scratch. It can be pretty relaxing.