What's been lately pulling me AFK and AFS (away from Steemit)

The last five weeks have been a whirlwind! But the price paid has been very little time for posting more than the bare minimum of daily Defense Department contracts. I hope to return to producing venn diagrams again soon, but another upcoming trip to Orlando will keep me super busy for another two weeks. In the meantime, I thought I'd share some of the AFK experiences I've enjoyed!

Most of my time is lately consumed in the company of a wonderful man, my new boyfriend Allan. We met back in May on the online dating site Our Time and got to know one another over the summer. But our wires got crossed and we stopped dating before anything serious developed. We stayed friends though, and this fall he started teaching me how to play poker. I have very little card sense and no real knowledge of card games, so it's been novel, fun, and somewhat challenging. I have beat the pants off him a few times, though! But when he bluffs me with that stoic poker face and turns his cards with a twinkle in his eye, it gets me right in the feelz. I can't imagine ever being deft enough to pull that off.

Here's a fun hand we played during one of our lessons -
we both had a full house, but mine took it!

Over the poker table we got to know each other better and started hanging out and now we're kind of inseparable! Allan is from Denmark and is a full-blooded Viking Dane, so it's super fun to discuss the language differences (there are many!) and the cultural differences between our two home countries.

He moved to the US a few decades back because of his sport, footbag, maybe better known to Americans as hacky sack. Footbag was pretty popular around Denver and Boulder and he loved Colorado so much he stayed longterm. Anyway, footbag involves not only freestyle kicking, but also a type of "volleyball" game you play over a net using only your feet and a very hard bag (most hacky sacks have a looser fill).

Allan competing in Montreal in 1998

Allan is a four-time world champion in this sport and even now, in his 50s, his skills, coordination, and strength are amazing: he kicks like someone half his age. If you'd like to see him in action, this video from about 20 years back is pretty impressive:

He sewed me a footbag of my own in colors I picked out and I've been learning how to make contact with my foot (which is way harder than it looks). He's also a pretty good disc golfer, which is another game he's trying to teach me. His work is definitely cut out for him! I was on the golf team in high school, but it's helping me not at all.

Some of you know that I've been struggling to lose some weight that piled on as a side effect of an antibiotic I took last year. Trying to learn disc golf and footbag kicking, as well as the many dog walks and a few hikes we've taken, have all contributed to my losing more of that weight - a total of about 10 pounds over the last month! I really have to thank him for getting me back out into nature, and it's been fun for me to photograph both Allan and his dog, Odin, out and about. But he was nice enough not to ask me to climb this tree with him when the ball he threw for Odin got stuck in a branch!

Odin and his ball on a non-snowy day

Allan is also a woodworker, and in this picture of the flowers he gave me for Halloween (is that the sweetest thing ever?) you can see a display case he built for many of his old footbags (which he also sews, himself). Such a creative guy!

It hasn't all been exercise and weight loss, though...

Well, that's all for now. Hopefully I can find a better balance between online and offline life and can get back to producing venns and maybe even some poetry or fiction posts! Bye for now!