I feel terribly manly.

I’ve restarted my Tai Chi Chuan exercises in the morning. I realized I was beginning to deal with some of the same physical problems that I thought I had under control this weekend after assembling a new entertainment center & computer desk. Things like upper back spasms and knee swelling around the articular cartilage–not exeedingly painful, but enough of an annoyance that I figured it was time to get back on some sort of exercise routine that would be a good compliment to my 2 miles of walking a day. So starting on Saturday morning, I am doing a self-modified routine every morning for 20 minutes. It focuses primarily on those two trouble issues, dealing with balance and muscle refinement around my scapulas and knee cartilage.

Today, I feel full of energy, and the pain has begun to lessen.

Valentine’s Day is fast approaching. I’m beginning to get nervous about the whole thing. Honestly, I’ve never been in a relationship around this particular day, and I feel extremely silly making such a big deal out of the whole thing. It’s one of those things, where I know how I feel, and John Paul knows how I feel, so it’s merely an exercise in … proving it? I don’t really know the meaning and purpose behind the experience, but I do know that I want to do something special.

Of course, I actually have plans for the evening, but I can’t share them here. I can be held accountable to talking about the evening later this week.

The apartment itself is shaping up nicely. My friend Justin & his boyfriend took yesterday afternoon to help me pull the remaining large items (save my easy chair, which wouldn’t have fit in either of their cars) from my old apartment to the new one. Now that I have most of the things off the floor and out of boxes, it’s begining to look a little more ‘lived in.’

I’ve also spent some time working with PHPMailer recently, because I got a project that required I use a mail server that isn’t hosted at the same place as the system that needs to send the mail. I’ve been pretty impressed with it thus far, though I can think of a few things I’d like to modify about it. I may just delve into the code and see if I can improve things a bit if I have time later this week.

I’ve also started developing a template class system to automate some of the more boring aspects of my job. It’s definitely just in the preliminary stages, but it’s showing promise. I think the more I work, the more likely it is that I’m going to develop an entire framework that I can use, secretly perhaps, for web development. Having used QCoda and Symfony before, I’ve been impressed with the breadth of the development, but saddened by the plodding speed of it all. Frameworks don’t have to perform so slowly just to save you a few thousand keystrokes.