Year: 2012

Day 149 of 1000 (209.8 lbs.)

Note the weight!!!  I thought I was going to get killed, but I am doing OK.  The big news, though, is that Christian has started blogging again at his website Nerdhow.com (Nerdhow.net also works) that he got for his birthday and is hosted by FatCow (love the name, love the price, love the service).  He is putting a ton of his college notes up their with his signature (no pun intended) handwritten serif font.  He gets paid to take notes for his Differential Equations course so that is very cool.

P.S.  I will be in Wilmington at some Nuke plant on Wednesday.  Cool.  I wonder if it is anywhere close to Kendall.

Day 147 of 1000

I got into a big discussion with a good friend about sports this weekend.  I was a sports fanatic until I went to college.  In college, I was a Judo fanatic, but started to lose my enthusiasm for things like football and basketball.  I went to a few football games in college, but mostly just read the newspaper on Sunday so I could talk trash about the games on Monday.  That eventually evolved into consistent workouts with no interest in sports at all.  By the time Kelly and Christian came along I hit what I hope was a happy medium–I wanted my kids to get consistent exercise, but no desire for them to be as out of balance with sports as I.

Now, my involvement with sports involves talking trash about sports on Monday (of course I don’t watch the games, but get the scores on the internet).  The funny deal is that I derive much more joy in hating teams than liking them.  I really don’t like the Beavers anymore at all.   I don’t dislike them either.  They bore me.  Still, under the right circumstances I can be a fan, just not when I am with anyone from Oregon.  Well, that is not exactly true–Warren and I STILL have some great conversations about the Beavers, but that is more about hanging out with Warren than being a fan of the Beavers.  I derive much more joy hating the Ducks because, well, they are the Ducks.  The same can be said for many, many professional and college sports teams because the people who play the games lead such deplorable lives.  Tom Brady from New England is a case in point.

All of this brings me quite a bit of satisfaction because my daughter has become a big fan of football.  She does not like football for any other reason that Tim Tebow is doing his level best to lead an exemplary life, not to mention that he is handsome, kind, and hard working.  Very cool.  If she likes football because of model behavior, I can go with that.

Day 146 of 1000

I have worked in my new job for a month now.  It is (and will be) a crazy life for the next few months.  We live a three hour drive from the main office, so I only go there two days per week.  The company is a sales driven company so much of my work is in support of their efforts.  There is a person in charge of the machine vision sales support, but they need me to travel with the each of the sales guys for a day or two to get to know them.  That is why my life will be fairly crazy through the rest of the winter and into the spring.  We have already started to identify some bigger projects that will require development time in the office, so I can see a light at the end of the tunnel.

In the meantime, the kids and Lorena are blasting away at school.  We got some great new in that regard on Friday.  I will just repost Lorena’s Facebook entry here:

Well, I tried to decide whether or not to post this, but we are very happy for Christian right now. This semester he has a very heavy academic load (Differential Equations, Calculus based Physics II, Linear Algebra, and two other classes). It is a struggle to take such heavy classes, but we were encouraged today when we received the following letter:

As for the weight loss program, I am STILL on it, struggling mightily.  Between taking Lorena out for a birthday dinner, taking customers to lunch and eating on the road, I have some challenges, but I got in a good workout with Christian yesterday and found a gym in the hotel where I stay when I am at the home office, so I am sticking to the program and will post weights again on Wednesday!

Finally, Christian and I meet Andrew and François in the Biological and Agricultural Engineering lab at NCSU Saturday morning for the first time in several months.  There is some exciting opportunities at GaugeCam–more about that later.

Day 136 of 1000 (210.7 lbs.)

I was dreading getting on the scale again this morning, but I think my battle with the flu might have helped me a little.  Woo-hoo.  I made it through the holiday season and am actually down five pounds from when I started a month ago.  Since the month is December and my record is not good (actually it is remarkably bad) in December, I WILL TAKE IT!.  In the meantime, Kelly started back to school yesterday, Christian starts today, and Lorena starts on Monday.  For now, I will head up to Charlotte two days per week and work from home three days per week.  I read back through the last month or so of my blog posts.  Some of them were OK, but some of them were those “the weather is really nice here” kinds of posts that are not so acceptable.  I will work on it.

In the meantime, Warren has a nice post about his Uncle JC over at Truth Has a Chance.

Day 132 of 1000

It seems right to worship God on Sunday morning as the first act of 2012.