le blog de bloogue

I’ve been lazy and not CC’ing my blog when posting to flickr. If you wish, here’s the URL:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/trypnotic/

Also, here’s some SNL videos you should watch:

Nick Burns: Your Company’s Computer Guy – Video 1 | Video 2 | Video 3 | Video 4 | Video 5
Not that I need to REMIND ANYONE but don’t click on any popups windows, that you may see by visiting any of these links, that say your computer is infected by a virus.

At my most recent Weight Watchers weigh-in, today, I was down a total of 50.4lbs. Of course, that may be different now given that we had Sonic for dinner tonight. Oops. Anyway, I still have another 70 to go. I’m guessing it probably won’t go nearly as fast as the first fifty did! We’re still with Lifetime Fitness in Chanhassen and I’m going at least three times a week. That combined with eating smaller portions and getting all my water in seems to be doing the trick. We also picked up a Wii Fit a few weeks ago now and that has helped marginally with my balance and such.

Started off this lovely Sunday by dropping Katie and Brandy off at the airport around 8am. They listed themselves for a flight to Duluth to spend a day with Kris and Cliff, get some shopping in and some Red Lobster. Meanwhile, Kieran and I took advantage of the empty Mall of America and walked three laps in there for a nice 1.5mi walk. Kieran pointed out each store that was closed. Even by the third lap, he was still amazed how many stores were closed. After we finished our walk, we took the light rail up to Minnehaha Park and wandered around there for a bit. We haven’t been there before so we figured with the extra time on our hands, never a better time than the present! We continued on, back on the light rail, to downtown Minneapolis. There was clearly a Twins game today as a majority of the people on the train had jerseys on and such. I guess baseball will never be one of those things I’ll ever understand or get excited about. We arrived downtown, and I convinced Kieran he was hungry as it was now around 10am and neither of us had anything to eat yet. After getting off the light rail in the Warehouse District, we took a shot in the dark and headed to Pizza Luce. With some luck, they had JUST opened up for brunch! Kieran nabbed some OJ and a cheese quesadilla while I had some sort of scrambled marinated tofu, peppers, hashbrowns, and tomatoes (I think). My GOD it was GREAT! Due to our train tickets expiring in the next half hour, we decided that we better get back on the train and back to the mall. From there, we headed back to Chaska and nabbed some petunias, a tomato plant, and a few planters from Home Depot. Ok, so it’s probably a little too early for it all but we’ll give it a shot anyway and keep an eye out for low temperatures.

I’d have some photos to share but the Wing got left at work on Friday. I had left early to go with Katie and Brandy to the school district’s early childhood screening. She did a great job and took it very seriously! With that, she scored a 30 — with the requirement for Kindergarten being a score of over 21. She’s still another 1-1.5 years away from that but at least we know where she’s at.

I started going to Lifetime’s Team Weight Loss class every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in order to suppliment my Weight Watchers progress. Every Monday, we meet with a nutritionist for a half hour and get chastised if we’re not filling out our food/exercise journal. I’ll likely get regularly yelled at for lack of filling mine out — it’s just so much easier to keep track of my food via Weight Watchers eTools than it is figuring out how many starches, proteins, etc. I’ve ate during the day. The other half of the class, exercise, usually lasts 25-50 minutes per nights. We’re usually on a treadmill with weights and bands and keep our heart rate up in the zone 2-3 range. This will go on for a total of twelve weeks and we just completed our first week so I don’t really have any progress to report. However, I am starting my fourth month of Weight Watchers and have lost a total of 43lbs since mid-January. Earlier last year, I was seriously considering pursuing the idea of getting the lapband — the gastric bypass alternative, to assist me with my weight loss. Then later that year, I started thinking… you know, if I can raise two kids, I should be able to lose this weight on my own. So far, that method of thinking has been working well.

Nothing else to report for now. So far I’m surviving the possible NW/Delta merger, pending congressional approval. Keeping myself as optimistic as possible with Brandy’s assistance. Bye bye.

Here I am lookin’ like a robot. We’re going to find out tonight if I have sleep apnea. If I do, this will likely qualify me for getting a lap band. They’ve got about 13 diodes attached to my head and 2 to my legs to monitor my sleep habits throughout the night. If I “wake up” 20 times in a hour, then I have it and I leave tomorrow AM. If I don’t wake up 20 times, then I have to stick around tomorrow during the day for some sort of nap study where they’ll monitor daytime drowsiness. Fun stuff.

I have the cold from hell (I assume it’s a cold anyway), my wife is in Vegas, the kids are crazy. Oh, and the dog just peed on the floor again. How is it possible that the two times my wife goes out of state during our marriage, I get sick as hell? Anyone want to do some pro-bono babysitting? The kids had McDonald’s for lunch and Papa Johns for dinner. At least they ate some bananas and raspberries for breakfast so their diet for the day wasn’t completely trashed.

Well I’ve updated the old Amazon.com wishlist once again for this wonderfully stressful time of the year. As you can see from the listing, there’s just about one thing on my mind these days.

Sorry for the duplicate posts, LJ people. I had DNS switch my site over to a new provider and I think the LJ syndication said, “Oh lookie! New posts!” *yoink*

I finally gave in and switched from hosting my own server to a commercial hosting service. I’m too old to keep up with server maintanence and such. OK, maybe not too old… too busy and maybe a smidge of disinterest. If time ever allows, I’d eventually like to start playing around with Cider again, Cider being the name of the server that had been hosting my web site. With the size of my blog and photo gallery ever growing, I became much more particular about what I did on that server. I originally built Cider for the purpose of learning how to administer a Linux box. I guess with it becoming the server of which I successfully hosted multiple web sites, ftp, users, and mail for three years, I guess my learning could be seen as a success. With everything setup just exactly how I wanted it, I became afraid to change it, at risk of breaking something which defeated its initial purpose. I could build another box sure, but I’m lazy and it’s just simply no longer a top priority.

Well the verdict is in and I officially broke a bone in my right foot while vacationing in Myrtle Beach. The most important bone in the body — a heel spur.

I broke it the first day, Sunday evening (August 20), while jumping down from a ledge that apparently was a little too high for a safe landing. While I walked away with a little limp, the pain the next morning after I woke up was certainly noticeable. By Thursday, I was able to get around just about as easily as I’ve been able to for the last few weeks. It hurts most in the morning or after I’ve been idle for 15-20+ minutes and can get annoying again after walking more than 30 minutes. An unfortunate side effect is that the mild limping caused by this has spread to my back which has caused pain when sitting down.

The solution? Spenco Orthotic inserts which seem to be priced at around $30, ice for 20 minutes each night, heel cord stretch, and to come back and see him in four weeks. If I had come in sooner, I would have been given either a cast or boot but since the pain is bearable, I can wait it out at this point.

Oh if he’d only come online… just so I could talk to him again…