My Tent on The Beach

I’m not sure how many of you remember the joy I stumbled upon a couple Christmases ago playing “Guitar Hero” on the XBox.  And then there was “Rock Band.”  And then, I made a major decision: to buy a Wii (because it looked cool) so that I could also get “Guitar Hero” and play it all the time.

Which I did for about 2 weeks.  And then I couldn’t get Foghat’s “Slow Ride” out of my head for weeks and the “Cliffs of Dover” on the hard setting would haunt me through the day.  So I set the whole thing aside for awhile.

But harkening back to that fateful Thursday when I met the dude off Craigslist who was scalping selling this thing to me for the bargain price of [ahem], ladies don’t talk dollars, because he worked at Best Buy and could grab ‘em up with an employee discount.  We exchanged the goods in a parking lot.  I payed cash.  It was shady and somewhat exciting.  I couldn’t let that story just go to waste.

Fast forward to 2 weeks ago when EA Sports introduced Active for the Wii.  This is their far superior answer to Wii Fit and I can’t believe I’m saying this but Active makes me wake up to work out.  I wish it didn’t. But it does.  With its little red resistance band, awesomely cool “leg band” that makes ya feel like an athlete just wearing it, and the perky trainer who tells me, “I have nothing but respect for that performance.”  And I get trophies…and charts and graphs…and calorie counts.  It’s ridiculous and amazing. I’ve burned 1000 calories already.  How do I know?  I got me a trophy that says so.

I do have a little workout guilt.  After years of the grind…walking to the gym, hating the gym, hating the treadmill for 30 minutes, hating the elliptical less than the treadmill but more than the recumbent bike…I feel like this is a game.  And yet I’m a sweaty mess when I’m done so something good must be going on.

And it’s fun.  Can workouts be such a thing? Wii says yes.

My early budding farm

I can’t get enough of this game right now.  Yes it’s on Facebook.  I need to share the joy.

Well, I’m kind of excited.  I’ve been blogging for a long time.  In fact, it’s almost been 3 years.  And while Vox and Blogger and all of those were great, recently, I’ve felt obscenely confined by their design rules.  So, I’ve done what I always wanted to do.  The Beach Tent is now free and clear of constraints…and has landed at it’s very own domain name (whatever that means).

But what’s funny about this process is that I think it pretty much is a metaphor for the way I go about my daily life. What easily could have been a 10 minute process, I turned into a six-hour journey into how web site management works.  While I now know what FTP means (and I’m angry about it) and I know how to set up a database in c-panel (this just makes me furious), last night the light went on too late and I realized that because I am who I am, I turned a simple, easy process into the behemoth of all productions.

But it did render me this in the end, which I’m thrilled about.  I’m really not changing my schtick or my handle.  But I am going to consolidate.  Instead of trying to find blogs to fit all of my categorizing needs, I’m just gonna write about all of it here, and put my pictures up, and generally take pride in the fact that I’m now the proud owner of a “domain” (which makes me sound lord-like, actually).

You’re free and welcomed to be my serf whenever you like.  Give me a couple weeks to really get things settled…and then we’re off to the races again.

Patience, people. This has been a long time in coming…