kalbzayn

Since giving up pop on May 28th (except for 1 on purpose vacation day and 2 bad days), I've gone from 218 to 208 pounds. Sweet...or maybe lack thereof.

My pants are getting more comfortable, but I won't need to buy new pants for a while since I bought the ones that I have when I weighed 195ish and was hoping to lose a couple pounds.

We're getting into football/holiday season where I normally indulge a little more often. But, I'm also going to the gym more often (as opposed to the never that I've been doing for a couple years). It will be interesting to see which habit wins out in my battle to get back below 200.

So what does all of this have to do with the title. A human head weighs about 10 pounds. But didn't we learn that from Jerry Maguire?

My schedule has dramatically shifted recently. I finished my high pressure work projects, made decent progress with some home projects, and hosted a toddler slumber party.

So what could possible be left for me to do.

1) Daddy day care. I'm taking off Monday through Wednesday next week and staying home with the kids. I have not watched the kids for that continuous of a block in as long as I can remember. I'm looking forward to lots of hours playing puppet show, driving trucks, and playing in the backyard. We're also having a garage sale on Saturday at my parents' house. Rebecca will be handling the selling while I entertain the kids at our house.

2) Painting. I finished painting the tough spot over the stairs and the hallway at the top of the stairs and then lost my momentum. Starting tonight, I'm going to work on getting the bathroom patched, primed and painted.

3) Work. Even though I have 3 days off next week, I'm still not looking forward to Thursday. We are having a mandatory fun night after work on Thursday. We're going to Medieval Times. I've been there before and it is entertaining but I just hate mandatory fun. Especially since I received the invitation earlier this week. Would it kill them to schedule this stuff in advance? Another problem I have with Medieval Times is their menu. Everybody gets the same meal which includes chicken and ribs. Sounds good except for those of us with poultry allergies. I need to remember to have the person scheduling the event ask about an alternative meal plan for me. On the plus side, they have a torture museum that is pretty neat and creepy.

4) Back to the gym. Because of the projects around the house, we've been bad about going to the gym for the last couple weeks. We went again on Tuesday and have plans for tonight which will hopefully get us back into the routine.

5) Websites. I mentioned last week that I've been working on some websites. Here is the list.

Be A Good Dad
Webby Thoughts
Talk Hawkeyes

I was expecting to develop them over the next couple months and see what happened. Then a story on the Be A Good Dad site got picked up by Reddit, somehow became popular and brought in about 3000 pageviews. Right when it was starting to slow down, it got picked up on MSNBC. The page is a list of interesting articles that they writer visits throughout the day and a brief comment on them. That brought in about 2000 more pageviews. Just to put that in perspective, I've had about 5000 pageviews on a brand new site over the last two days. This blog has received just under 10,000 pageviews since I started it back in October. Weird. It'll be rough when the pageviews go back to about 20 a day tomorrow.

The other day, we watched a show that discussed how ICEE's were made and the history of the company.

Of course we had to have one.

So, I got in the car at about 9pm and drove to Target. Their food area was closed. So, I drove to 7-Eleven and perused the inventory. Every flavor was based on a Pepsi or Coke product. Since I'm trying to stay away from the pop these days, I almost backed out. It seemed a little too close to a gateway drug to me.

Finally, I told myself that I can quit again any time I want and it wasn't a real pop anyway and poured away. One for me, one for Rebecca. Two different flavors.

I drove home and prepared to enjoy. (No, I didn't drink any on the way home because I was going to let Rebecca choose which flavor she wanted.)

She made her choice and we started sipping away. Our dreams of reliving childhood pleasantries instantly melted. Much like the ICEE had. It was pop flavored syrup in just a tiny bit of slush.

Now, to be fair to ICEE, it isn't really there fault. These were not official ICEEs. They were the abominations the soda companies are offering. The trouble is I can't remember seeing a real ICEE machine in ages now that K Mart are almost as common as a dinosaur. I want the kind of ICEE where the flavors are Red and Blue Raspberry. Even their version of the Coke flavor is pretty good.

With the power of the internet at my disposal, I did a little research today. ICEE is still around and has a website. A poor website at that. The text above the circle in the middle that looks like text is really a hyperlink. Click on them and it will open a popup.

I found several locations near my house including the Target that I had tried. I have a feeling there is a Red ICEE in my near future.

Here are some fun ICEE facts I found on their website:

ICEE is sold in over 30,000 outlets nationwide, along with outlets in Canada and Mexico - I knew there had to be one close to me.

Over 300,000,000 ICEEs are sold each year - it looks like they are still going strong.

I studied Arabic for the military. We had 63 weeks to learn the language and get ready to start our job. The classes met 8 hours a day 5 days a week. We were pounded with new vocabulary constantly.

Fortunately for me, I stumbled upon a vocabulary learning technique just before I signed up for the military that saved my life...or at least helped me make it through the class.

Here's how it works.

1) Find 5 envelopes and label them Day 1 through Day 5.
2) Write all of the vocabulary you are trying to learn on small index cards and put them all in the Day 1 envelope. (I prefer something about 1" X 2")
3) Read the foreign language side of each card, if you know the English definition, place it in the Day 2 envelope. If you don't know the English version, set it aside - it's going to go back in the Day 1 envelope.
4) Study all of the cards left in the Day 1 envelope throughout the day.
5) The next day, read all of the Day 2 cards. If you know the English definition, place in the Day 3 envelope. The ones that you don't know are going to go back in the Day 1 envelope. Yes, I said Day 1.
6) Everyday, any cards that you get correct move forward a day and the ones you get wrong go back to Day 1.

Once a card has made it through Day 5, put it in a box that you look at every couple of weeks to keep the words your learned a while back fresh in your mind. By the end of the class, I had around 3000 words in a couple boxes. I flipped through the entire box about once a month.

This technique has two things going for it.
1) When you study your vocabulary, you are spending your effort on the words you don't know.
2) You still spend a brief time studying the words that you know throughout a week to make sure that you really know them. Sometimes a word might be fresh in your mind for some reason, but when you look at it the next day it looks like a foreign word.


For our purposes, our focus was on foreign language to English so that was the direction I focused on. For most people, you will probably want to make sure you can go foreign to English and vice versa before advancing the card.

Also, this technique works for people other than native English speakers. Just replace English with your primary language and enjoy.

If you have any questions, let me know and I'll try to explain it better. If you happen to know what book I found this in, let me know and I'll provide the proper credit. I remember it was a little quick tip in the sidebar.

Our 2 1/2 year old cousin is in town to visit. He lives in the country. The real country. He's constantly hanging around cows, goats, and sheeps at his grandpa's barns across the street.

We drove him here on Saturday night and he is heading back home tomorrow. So far, these are the things that amazed him the most:

1) Drinking water doesn't live in the fridge in the city. It hides in the sink. He has well water, so bottled water is an everyday occurance.

2) There are more tractors in the city than the country. Summer in the city is construction season. New roads, fixed roads, and new buildings grow here faster than the corn. All of those projects use tractors. Big tractors. Lots of tractors.

3) You can go for a walk and find a store...with desserts. A quick walk to Meijer after dinner in the wagon netted us some cookies, a college football magazine, and some garage sale stickers. You just can't get anywhere by foot out in the country.

4) There are storm drains everywhere. He spent most of the trip to the store leaning over the wagon pondering the depths trying to determine where they went and whether there were any more cookies down there. Or at least milk.

Starting tomorrow, our kids will be spending a couple nights up at their cousin's house. I wonder what kind of neat country things they will tell us about when they return.

Seriously. You probably don't want to read this.

When you're going poop at work and those little timed air freshner sprayers go off, do you sometimes forget that they are timed and yell, "Come on. It just hit the water. You gotta give me a little time" before calming down?

And when you are in said act, do you ever hear the guy next to you peeing, cut a big fart and yell, "Dude. That's disgusting before you realize what you are in fact doing at that moment that caused the air freshner sprayer to scold you?

Or am I just weird?

I've been a little busy over the last few weeks. Here's what I've been up to.

1) Painting. We're painting the hallway going up the stairs to the second floor which includes a litte 16 foot high section right above the bottom of the stairs. I only have one part left, edging the walls on that high part. Unfortunately, that is going to be the toughest part. I should finish that tonight or tomorrow.

2) Potty Training. J seems to be understanding the whole wet versus dry issue. He's starting to tell us when he is wet. Or at least when the floor is. We're not putting nearly as much pressure on standing him in front of the potty all day. We still make him do it periodically just to remind him that it is there. Who knows when potty training will finish.

3) Work. I'm working on two projects at the same time right now. Since I'm a consultant, that means two different cities, two different operating systems, two different applications. As I get older, I'm learning that I am not a good multi-tasker. I can handle a lot of little projects well, but normally only by doing one at a time. The split projects should end Thursday or Friday. I only have one more day doing clean up work at one of the clients.

4) Fiction. I started a story and by started, I mean just barely. Somewhere between 500-1000 words. I don't have an outline or any idea how many words it is going to be and don't care right now. It will be my fun project whenever I want to take a few minutes to do some fiction writing.

5) Blogs. I've decided to try to start a few other blogs. I bought the domain names and am working on setting them up. I'll let you know about them when I'm ready. I'm pulling out big topics that I think I'd prefer to talk about somewhere outside of here. Iowa Hawkeye football, Sirius radio, Internet technology and software, and parenting. I'll probably still drop posts in here about those topics from time to time but this one will focus on my day to day and any fiction writing that I end up doing.

Nothing wild or exciting, but that's what I've been doing recently.

I had a little bit of a flashback yesterday about basic training for some reason. I was in the Air Force from 1995-1999. It was a very good decision and a good place for me at the time.

Anyway, I spent the night at a hotel in Chicago with a bunch of other kids who were running around drinking and partying. I went to bed early. I figured I'd react to the initial wave better on a decent night sleep.

By the time we arrived in San Antonio, it was dark. A bus drove us around for a ton of time longer than necessary to help confuse us and string along the anxiety. When the bus finally stopped in front of our dorm, some guy in a uniform ran onto the bus and told us we had 90 seconds or something ridiculous like that to get off the bus or we would all have to climb back in and try it again.

It took us a few tries.

Finally, they had us lined up in front of the dorm and ready to begin our basic training. We were all carrying a backpack, suitcase, or whatever we were carrying out stuff in. Just one bag, though. The instructor ordered all of us to put our backpacks down at the same time by yelling, "Put 'em down."

If there were 60 of us, then there were 60 different sounds.

We were ordered to, "Pick 'em up," and "Put 'em down," again.

Maybe 50 different sounds.

We repeated this about a thousand times. I'm sure they probably had some of the other sergeants hanging around our motley group dropping some of their own bags to disrupt the sound a make sure we got to continue for a while longer.

Some people got made fun of, yelled at and started crying. I think they made fun of my haircut. I had cut my previously super long hair about 6 months earlier and had been wearing my hair cut with clippers with no guard since then. They don't like when you come in with your hair already cut like they plan on cutting it during your first haircut.

By the time everybody got their bags put down at the same time, I was actually tired of lifting the bag so many times.

When getting yelled at some of the kids tried to fight back, but of course, eventually fell in line. That is really what the whole experience of basic training was about anyway. Setting your individual feelings aside so that you can focus on doing what is right for the group and following the orders exactly as they are given.

The lesson started from day 0 with the simple commands of "Pick 'em up. Put 'em down."

Technorati tags: Air Force, USAF, Basic Training

This post is going to give me some bad karma but it has to be said.

We took the kids to the Brookfield Zoo on Friday and had a great time. We rode the train there and back which might have been more fun to the kids than the zoo itself.

Brookfield Zoo is a large zoo with tons of animals and, in general, worth the price of admission. We normally go to Lincoln Park Zoo which happens to be my favorite from many trips in high school when I could not afford to go anywhere else. Lincoln Park has to be the greatest free zoo in the world.

I've put off saying my evil statement long enough. I wish zoos would quit building such friendly environments for the animals.

Well, I haven't been hit by lightning yet so I'll continue.

You take a lion out of Africa where he roams where ever he wants over the entire continent, throw him in a cage to transport him to Chicago where he's going to get to run around a portion of a zoo.

Do you think he's going to really be impressed with the 5000 sq. ft. pen you create for him complete with tall grass as opposed to a 1000 sq. ft. pen that maybe doesn't have any grass? Do you think that the lion ever wakes up in the morning saying, "I can't wait until that funny looking guy throws that dead animal in for us to eat?

You've already screwed the poor lion over pretty badly. Then you charge me quite a decent sum of money to come look at the magnificent beast only to find him flopped over some rock so far away that he barely looks bigger than a house cat.

Show me a little respect by letting me actually see the animal instead of just some speck in a habitat that vaguely resembles his home. Show the animal some respect by throwing him some live animals to hunt, kill, and eat.

If an animal is a nocturnal animal, keep him inside at all times and flip his day and night cycles so that when I come to visit him during the day, he isn't sleeping in some comfy little hole in the ground you made to simulate his natural environment. If you wanted him to live like a normal animal, you should have left him where you found him.

And finally, I don't really want to learn anything about the dolphins when I pay to see a show that they are in. Believe it or not, I am there to see the freaks jump insanely high out of the water. I don't care what they eat or what their various fins are called. I never went to a Bulls game to learn about Michael Jordan's dining habits and physiology. I came to see him jump out of the gym. Show me the neat dolphin stuff. If I want to learn the rest, I'll go to school.

I taught a Unix class at work on a Saturday a few weeks back. When I agreed to teach the class, my boss and his boss both told me that I would make $500 for the class.

So, I put a bunch of work into preparing the coursework and then spent time setting up the class, teaching the class, and cleaning up afterward.

Then I waited for the money to roll in.

About a week ago, I asked my boss if I had to fill out any special paperwork to get paid for the class. He told me no, he'd take care of it.

Then he came back and told me that they had mistakenly quoted me the wrong amount for how much I was supposed to get paid. They were only supposed to pay me my hourly wage for the hours I was teaching the class. I don't make $62.50, so that was going to be a pay cut.

I told him that was unacceptable. I told him that I would not have spent the hours preparing the class and then waste a Saturday for that money.

For some reason, he seemed shocked to hear this. He said he would go see what he would do.

He came back a couple days ago and told me that they were going to pay me the $500 we had originally agreed upon. He seemed to wait around for a moment for me to thank him and then walked away when he realized that was not going to happen.

I'm not sure why he thought it would be a good idea to try to steal a couple hundred dollars from me.