// personal

Between standing for hours on end at the state HOG rally, Jeff and Marcia’s wedding (at which I was a groomsman), dancing at the reception afterwards, having Cody walk on my back and then jump off, and picking up a 21in monitor, I torqued my back somehow. Went to the doctor yesterday, and he gave me some muscle relaxers, but they don’t seem to be helping much. I ended up getting up at 3am to sleep in the recliner with the heating pad.

// personal

So, Friday afternoon/evening, we're having power problems. Stays on for 20 minutes, goes out for an hour to an hour and a half. This continues all evening (twice while I was online. You'd think I'd have gotten the hint the first time....).

Around 11:15 it comes back on again, and something happened to the neighbor's home security system. It starts going off on its own accord. Nice, LOUD annoying "BREEEP BREEEP BREEEP pause BREEEP BREEEP BREEEP..." and so on. I could not get to sleep until about 4:30am because of that damn thing. I even took a walk up the road at 3am to take a look and see if I could disconnect it, because, obviously by now, there was no one home.

Turns out the homeowners had dropped the security service that monitors the alarms, but kept the alarm hooked up. And, naturally, the homeowners were out of town. Friggin' wonderful.

It didn't get shut off until 4pm Sunday afternoon.

I'd better get a nice bottle of beer from them or something.

// personal

As with many other people, I tend to make New Year's Resolutions every January. Typically, I've forgotten about them by Febuary. This year, I'm actually still focused on a couple of them, which is rather surprising.

Here were my resolutions:

  • Lose Weight
  • Get more organized
  • Work more on getting a small music studio setup

The losing weight is actually going well, though I haven't been doing it the whole time. I've only started dieting in the last week, but at least I'm making a conscious effort to lose weight now. I've also probably worked out more in the past 4 months than I did all of last year. Having a diet buddy helps, someone I can talk to when I need advice or motivation. Although her last journal entry will probably give me an upset stomach. Thong?!? Moi?! icky.

continue >>
// personal

I've never in my life been on a diet. Well, there was this time when I was in jr. high school ("middle school" they call it now...go figure) where my mom decided I wasn't getting enough protein or something and made me drink these hideous shakes that were just the nastiest things. They tasted like chalk.

Well, now I'm on a real, honest-to-god diet. I've known for some time that I've needed to lose weight. It just never was high on my priority list. For some reason though, the time has come to make it happen. There was nothing earth shaking that prompted this decision. It's just time to do it I guess. I don't want to be fat forever.

I've got some help this time through. I have my diet buddy who I mentioned before. I have Gail helping as well. She's been reading through different books about the low-carb diets (which is what I'm trying) and is helping me to eat better. We had meatloaf (with lean beef), beans and instead of mashed potatoes, we had mashed cauliflower. Gail chopped and whipped it up, put in some sour cream (low-fat of course ;), and some cheese, and wa-la! Mashed Cauliflower! It wasn't bad at all, but the real surprise was how Cody wolfed it down. He LOVED it.

So here's to hoping the diet works, I lose weight, start feeling better about myself and get all the hot young chicks to notice me without sucking in my gut all the time. Makes my head swell up funny when I do that.

// personal

Cody and I went to Whitetail yesterday with our Indian Guides group to do some snow tubing. In getting ready, I discovered that I didn't have a hat or gloves. As we were meeting everyone in the parking lot of Wal-Mart, I figured that I'd just pick up a new hat and some gloves there.

Well, silly me, I forgot that it's February. I mean, geez, apparently Spring is just around the corner (mind you, as I type this there's 5 inches of snow on the ground left over from last week, and it's snowing now). They had all their tank tops and flip flops out. When asked about ski caps and gloves, they looked at me as if I was silly and said "No, we don't have any of those". I was almost stunned. Wal-Mart, not HAVE something? sheesh

So Cody and I went hat-less, but the day was nice and neither of us was too bothered by it. We had a good time. I managed to find a tube that had a plastic bottom instead of a vinyl one. Got myself a good running start, belly-flopped down onto it, zoomed down the hill, crashed into the hay bails at the end and went through. It was awesome!

Also went and saw the new Jackie Chan movie, Shanghai Knights, this weekend. Oh man, I laughed my butt off. Hopefully, I'll get a review of it up and stuck in my movies section. I've let that part slack off a bit, but I'd like to get it up and running again, along with the Gallery script for picture management. Time will tell.