Thanks for the comments guys.
bobgreen wrote: Total bummer you might have to take a week before the baby is born but I think it is pretty awesome that you have a decent chunk of leave built up.
Good point. I am fortunate to have a job, to have enough leave to be in "use or lose," and to work for an employer that even has paternity leave. Gotta remind myself periodically to appreciate all the good things in my life, instead of complain about the minor stuff that could be better. Hopefully this week I get a more solid leave plan in place, so I have more certainty planning out the next year.
Justin- Thanks man! My unique fearless record is still 14, but I bet I could break that. I'm not feeling super motivated to dedicate entire sessions to it, but I might mess around with it a few times a session and see what happens. Something like phx-fog-dark-blw-blw-bed-pixie dod-tom-tom-blurrier-psw-psw-spin ducking osis-spanish fly-pdx torque-pdx blender feels doable, and that's 16.
I burned my first use-or-lose day on Friday, to give myself a 4 day weekend. Very happy with that decision...I feel mentally refreshed after taking off that amount of time. I got a lot of errands done, and I also got in a good amount of footbag. I played 3 out of 4 days, and on the day I didn't play Haley helped me complete Episode 8 of the pod:
https://thesymposium.modified.in/podcas ... hane-cook/
As I explained in an earlier post, I released this episode out of order because I had fallen behind schedule, and I wanted my first episode back to be a strong one. Episode 5 is my shortest episode, and has some technical issues with sound quality, so I decided to release Ep 8 first since it was longer, had better sound quality, and included some unique features I had been itching to try out. The idea of having other footbaggers ask questions, in their own voice, was stolen from the NPR Politics podcast. It'd be cool to do more stuff like that in the future, but it also was a lot of work. Same goes for the sketch portraits of guests. I think its a neat idea, but it also took me a long time to draw. I do think it's cool though that this project has gotten me to do things I don't normally do, like compose songs and draw portraits.
My first shred of the weekend was on Friday. Derek has recently started a video thread for "mostly toes," which I thought was a neat idea. I feel like my toe game is decent, but there's definitely a difference between playing into and out of weak toe in the middle of a string using clippers, and doing multiple toe tricks in a row that use weak toe. I found this session to be a good mental and physical challenge, and one I definitely would like to revisit in the future. Here are the highlights:
When I posted it to Facebook, Derek wrote:
Derek wrote: Toes are bad for ya health, only do Clippers.
That made me laugh, but I thought it'd be a funny response to make my next session entirely clippers. The video from that session got a better response on Facebook than the toes video, which surprised me since I found the toe stuff a lot harder and more challenging. Definitely a lot harder to bail without using clipper. Who knows...maybe people liked having a real song on the video instead of the silly YT music I used for the toes video.
Denver is definitely easing into fall. The leaves are changing, and there's a crispness to the air. I'm going to make a point to play on weekends, since we're already at the stage where I don't have time to walk the dog and footbag after work, since the sun (and temperature) goes down so quickly. I'll be in Southern California next week, so maybe I can get in some weekday shreds then.