Newness...

Finally got my new desk and chair today, so I'm adjusting to a new corner of the room and enjoying the newfound freedom. We also took some pictures today when we headed out to the military parade (today was a national "4th of July" type day for Bulgaria, and the entire week is a holiday...yeah, they take 6-8 days off of work...and have several such holidays per year. Gotta love Europeans!) so I'll have a new profile picture up soon here, as well as updating my Facebook and Twitter profile pics.

May's schedule is going to be fun. I took the month of April off from novel writing, although I did write a short story in there somewhere. However, this month I'm getting back into the schedule. I've got a deadline to make, and I've taken just about all of the slack I can take and still get it done by Christmas. I'm currently getting up at 7, working out from 7:30 to 8:30 (I do 12 kilos on the elliptical, + Pilate's and 5 kilo weights), then showering and settling into the work routine somewhere around 9 a.m. I'm usually done with my work by noon, although it can sneak to 1 p.m. if I slack off and browse sites or listen to music while I work. Then I take a break for an hour or so and come back and put in a few hours of chapter work, usually shooting for 1500-2k words per day. At least, this was the schedule I kept prior to April, and I'm going back to it.

Downside is my lower back has been hurting like hell for a few weeks now, which has been putting a crimp in my Pilate's. I think I might have wrenched something, so I've been avoiding doing any stressful workouts that might irritate it, and I'd been feeling fine until today. I stood in one spot for nearly 3 hours during the parade today and by the 2nd hour my lower back was in agony, and is still bothering me as I write this at 8 p.m at night. I've noticed it gets really bad when I do certain Pilate's exercises, so I decided I'm going to simply avoid doing those for the next couple of weeks and see if it doesn't heal up. If it's still bothering me I'm going to go see a doctor to make sure nothing is too tweaked out. Not sure what I did, but I have extremely flat feet and poor posture, which I'm sure contributes to the issue. Still, it's odd, because it hasn't been an issue until a few weeks ago, so I'm not sure what I did.

Anyway, that's it for now. I've got a few articles to do this evening, plus get those two short stories back out in submission that I've been meaning to do for the past week. Hopefully everyone's month of May is looking up! Mine is shaping up to be a fine one, and I'm pressing ahead looking towards that debt-free marker that's just around the corner in a couple of months!