Steve's Ambitious 6 Month's

So I sat down and had a long conversation with myself to figure out what I want to focus my spare time on over the next 6 months. I narrowed the list down and here they are the winners.

Vegetable Garden

Something I have thought about a lot and never have really done. Now that we are renting a house and its sunny all the time I have decided to start a garden. I'm doing it a little different then the usual plowed fields. I'm going to do what's called a "Square foot garden"
http://www.squarefootgardening.com/

"Square Foot Gardening is a uniquely simplified method of gardening that produces 100% of the harvest in only 20% of the space -- AND -- without all the hard work and drudgery of single row gardening."

I've read a lot about this technique and I think it will work out good. I want to grow lettuce, green pepper, cucumber, green beans, strawberries, snow peas and a few others.

Wood Strip Kayak

I've wanted to build my own Kayak for a few years now, and I have the space now to do it.
http://oneoceankayaks.com/Kayaks.htm
This will be a labour of love and will take a few hundred hours of swearing and sweat, I can't wait. I'm starting this within a month and hope to have it done by October. After it's done I want to build one for the wife and name it the HMCS Chatter Box. I might have to put water wings on her's.

Coffee Table

I've already started this, and once I get the wood it should be done over a couple of weekends. I was told about a re-conditioned wood place about a 25 minute walk from our place. It's awesome, we walked up on Saturday but it was closed by the time we got there. We stuck our head through the fence to have a look and it was a glorious sight. Lots of old beautiful wood all sorted and just waiting to be made into something.
Here's the site.
http://www.thebigredshed.com.au/
I will spend hours at this place, I love wood, and it loves me....
I've started buying wood working tools again, I've still got a ways to go but I'll get all the tools I need eventually. I just got a really nice tenon saw off ebay, she's a beauty.
http://www.lmii.com/CartTwo/thirdproducts.asp?NameProdHeader=Tenon+Saw
I'll need to pick up a table saw and a router for the Kayak. There's 3 or 4 buy and sell places around us so I've been able to pick up second gear at a decent price.

Home Made Wine

Something both Cari and I have wanted to do for a while now. After tasting Kathy and Joe's homemade wine, (by tasting I mean having many bottles....) we thought we would start off by doing a small batch in about 2 months or so. Again, we have the space to do it so theres no better time.

Running

Since I've moved to Brisbane I've lost 18 pounds. 12 weeks ago I gave myself a dead line to loose 10 pounds in 12 weeks. I was 216 pounds at the time, and tomorrow morning is the 12th week, I think I made it, I should weigh in at 206. It really helps that we don't have a car, so we have to walk everywhere. I get up at 6am almost every weekday morning and walk the dog for 30 -40 minutes. It takes 35 minutes to walk to work and 35 minutes to walk home. I also walk at lunch for 45 minutes. The last couple of weeks I've started running at lunch, so I now do a 4 km run 4 to 5 times a week (we do have a shower at work) All this walking/running and eating better has made loosing weight really easy. My end goal is 180 pounds, so I still have 26 pounds to go, so that should take about 6 to 7 months. I want to start doing fun runs and competitive running sometime, my real goal is to do a half Marathon (21km run) not sure when I'll be able to do that. There's a fun run coming up near us on July 22,
http://www.mbrr.net.au/index.asp?page=2
I'm going to do the 10km race.

So thats my next 6 months in a nut shell, add to that hopefully a couple scuba dive trips, a trip to Figi at Christmas, a dozen or so day trips to where ever, a couple cooking classes that Jeff and I want to take and few hot dates with the ball and chain (that would be Cari) I think I'll be a busy fella.

Steve (moven and shaken) Dickinson