back problems (temporarily?) revisited

The last couple of days have not been fun.

Apparently I pulled some sort of muscle in my back. This is especially comical when you consider that really the only “exercise” that I get is an hour of walking the dog each night. The rest of my time, including leading up to having said problems this go around, is typically spent sitting in a computer chair, so the HOW doesn’t really make much sense to me at all!

Though actually this is the second time that it’s ever happened to me – the first was maybe five years ago and got gradually worse throughout the day until I wasn’t comfortable until I was bent forward in my chair with my nose almost touching the keyboard … not really easy to type at that point!

The “solution” ended up being a couple of days off and some anti-inflammatory drugs from the doctor. This time I lucked out because the wife had some from her own back problems, so I was able to save a trip and a co-pay, but it has basically meant most of my time the last couple of days has either been spent a) laying on the couch; or b) laying in bed. Neither has really been very productive for me, though I did have a chance to get caught up on some of the TV shows that apparently I had saved on the DVR.

So in summary…

  • The Celebrity Apprentice – getting kinda bored with it, and wish each episode wasn’t 2 hours long (who has time for that?!)
  • Comic Book Men – season was far too short and I hope it gets renewed just because the banter was fun
  • I desperately need to get some writing done!
  • P.S. my back hurts…

Thin Post : Uncontrollable Splurgings…

Sometimes I really don’t understand my body, and a perfect example of this can be found in my continued problems with snacking.

You would think that my weekly weigh-in (Tuesday mornings) would be a great equalizer to either break bad habits after seeing a less than desirable change on the scale or even reinforce good habits as a result of an awesome week’s weight loss … and yet for several weeks in a row now I’ve been watching the exact opposite happen. Typically I’ll put in a little more effort the day before my weigh-in, or maybe even Sunday, too, but sometimes even that same day once I’ve stood on the scale and marked my “progress” down for another week, I’ve found myself absolutely plagued with horrible indulgences for candy and cookies and other snack foods that I often end up giving in to, even while I look at myself and think, “What am I DOING?!?!?!”

Maybe it’s just desperation – that would make sense for bad weeks, anyways, because admittedly it’s easy to eventually feel like you’re hitting a brick wall and stress eating kicks in because it can feel like the hard work and dedication is kind of worthless.

For the good weeks, on the other hand though … maybe it’s some sort of reward for having such good progress?! I don’t know – that angle kinda baffles me because you’d think after losing 2.8 pounds in a single week, I’d have been on top of the world and energized to keep it up in hopes of repeating that same success the next week! Then again, maybe the same kind of stress and tedium catches up either way and eventually just something’s gotta give…

I guess the key takeaway that I need to consider is that the stress, both from weight loss and elsewhere in life, is inevitable, so ultimately I need to find a better way of dealing with stress that doesn’t include going to town on a full-size bag of chips or an entire package of mini peanut butter cups!  😯

That’s a BIG SNAKE!!!!!!!!!!

The Smithsonian has had some really interesting articles recently, though admittedly this one steers more in the vein of terrifying than just plain awesome

Seriously – can you imagine a snake that was over 40-feet long, weighed over a ton, and literally ate crocodiles for breakfast?! It’s name *dramatic pause* was Titanoboa!

(note: the pic is actually a replica based on fossil findings – the beast itself lived about 58 million years ago, give or take a day…)

(Boy, that’d be something to find out in your living room when you’re still trying to wake up on a Sunday morning, wouldn’t it?!)

Lego Friends Robolab!

Albeit they’re a little expensive even for Legos, I can only imagine all of the different kinds of robots and stuff that I would’ve made as a kid had Lego Mindstorms been around when I was growing up! I did some experimenting with Lego Technics, which played with gears and pneumatics, but Mindstorms are just incredible with all of the different sensors and even being able to interface the lot with your computer for programming!  😀

On that note, I thought this particular video was pretty awesome because as much as I’m a fan of the new Lego Friends line aimed at making sets appealing for girls, it’s great to see a bondafide female fan of Legos combine these feminine sets with some of the Mindstorms gadgets to show that girls can be into science, too…

Politically Charged

Being an election year, I think politics has got me all up in arms a little more than usual lately. It’s the only thing in the news and every day has some new ridiculous thing that I can’t believe we’re actually debating about. It gets me fired up, and even though I wish it wasn’t all that I talked about, I find it dominating a lot more of my creative time than I would honestly prefer.

So I thought I’d try something a little different to try and purge the political poison from my system so that every single post that you read on this blog isn’t all about politics! 🙂 Rather than writing individual posts on every single one of them, here’s just a brief summary of my position on a lot of the topics that have been circling the news bin lately.

No say as to exactly how long this will tide me over, but here’s to hoping my next few posts can be about goofy YouTube videos and weird things found while I’m walking the dog instead of more stupidity belched out by the far right…  😯

Universal Healthcare is Very Important
Right now the Supreme Court is debating whether the government can force citizens to buy health insurance. Whether you like the proposed plan or not, it’s irrefutable that something needs to be done and at least the Affordable Healthcare Act was something, whereas at our current rate otherwise 10 years from now we’d still be bickering over details with no relief in sight. People are dying every year because they can’t afford to go to the doctor, and if we want to continue to call ourselves a society, then we need to take care of each other as such.P.S. Anyone who still refutes universal healthcare as socialism needs to go live somewhere else that doesn’t have roads, plumbing, police and fire protection, neighbors, and pretty much everything else around us – how can people be so arrogant to be blatantly against helping those in need?! It especially frightens me that it’s a lot of our parents and grandparents, which is weird because I certainly don’t remember them raising us to only take care of ourselves and let the next guy fend for himself…

Old, White Men Have No Business Regulating Women’s Health
This whole hubbub about abortion and now also contraception is just ridiculous because it sounds like half the men trying to regulate contraception don’t really understand how the concept even works. Women use contraception for lots of other health needs than just preventing pregnancy, and even if not, who cares?! Isn’t preventing pregnancy with the pill still better than having an abortion if one has an unwanted pregnancy??? It all comes down to these men wanting to control women’s lives because they don’t think people should be having sex outside of marriage.

Fuck you. Stay out of our women’s vaginas!

Your Employer vs. Mandated Contraception
One final note on this – it wouldn’t even be an issue if we were adopting actual universal healthcare instead of just mandating insurance. The new plan is still a step better than nothing, but ideally your employer shouldn’t even be involved because healthcare should be managed by taxes paid to the government – that way the church wouldn’t have this conflict about funding medicines that they don’t believe in because they wouldn’t even be a part of that puzzle in the first place.

Of course, that was the original plan for universal healthcare, but it got shot down because people cried socialism…

Rick Santorum is a Frightening Idiot
See his support of all of the above, and also just the other day, apparently this nutjob wants to outlaw pornography, too!

He’s entertaining because just when you think he can’t get any crazier, he opens his mouth again and it just comes streaming out, but at the end of this circus I don’t think that even the GOP is crazy enough to give him the nomination because he’s far to controversial to last in the Presidential election. Obama is still going to win either way, but he’d literally mop the floor with Santorum because the guy wants to return us to the god-fearing days of the 12th century and as much as his own people are eating it up now, his toxicity won’t persist when he has to attract the other party’s voters as well.

The Republican Party is Crazy
For anyone who still aligns themselves with the GOP … how do you even sleep at night, with those FOX News headlines still lying in the background?!

I can’t even take the party at large seriously anymore – they contradict themselves in nearly everything they say, they want to get rid of big government, except when it comes to things like giving breaks to billionaires and regulating vaginas, and it seems like they have no desire to actually function as a society that looks out for one another anymore. It’s easy to bitch that all of our manufacturing jobs have gone overseas, but nobody ever admits that the reason we’re screwed now is that we keep gutting our own education system so half our population isn’t smart enough to embrace the Information Age now that we’ve outsourced the Industrial Age overseas.

The Republican party instead wants to live in the past, thinking that if they can just repeal everything that the black guy in office has done so far, it’ll all go back to normal, gas prices will plummet, and we’ll all be able to live happily ever after. But that’s not reality, and we need individuals in office who are willing to accept that times are changing and the things that worked for them and their parents just aren’t good enough for future generations whose lives don’t consist of 70 hour workweeks on the farm and the occasional milkshake at the malt shop downtown…

Racism is Alive and Well
Anyone who claims that they’re “tired of people playing the race card” needs to take a good look around and face the fact that as much as they’d like to deny it, racism is still very much a problem in America – from discontent with our President to subconscious motivations behind Trayvon Martin’s murder to even something as inoccuous as the casting of black actors in The Hunger Games. Racism is ugly and it’s embarrassing to us as a society, but we can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist as long as segments of our population continue to think this way.

The President Has No Control Over Gas Prices
He didn’t when President Bush was up for re-election, and he still doesn’t now that the other guy is up for re-election. And yet Misleading Gingrich wants to stand up there and cite that if Obama would quit standing in the way of the Keystone Pipeline – you know, that tariff-free oil expressway that is basically an easy route for Canada to export oil overseas while avoiding all of the environmental transport impacts themselves?!

Four years ago, we were told that the way to lower gas prices was through fuel efficiency and reduction in demand. Or, you know, we could forget all of that logic and just try for some more empty promises – because those have always worked out so well for us in the past…

War
This is a simple one – we need to stop. America can’t continue to be the world police when there’s so much disarray already back at home. We could fix so many problems around our country with the money that we currently dump into defense. Some people are going to fight forever, and we can’t provide the solution to every single problem around the globe … shouldn’t we work a little harder at getting our own house in order before criticizing how other countries manage theirs?

Did I get ’em all?!  😮

Thin Post : Quick Review, Week #11

I’m not gonna lie – I’ve been pretty nervous about this week’s weigh-in. I was certain that between a decrease in exercise and all of my binge eating over the weekend (not to mention a particularly bizarre candy binge the day after I had my awesome weigh-in last week…), I was going to gain back some of the extra distance that I scored last week! Even only being a fractional amount again, seeing the scale continuing to move downward felt like a gracious gift and now I know that I have to do better this week because next week’s scale might not be nearly as forgiving…  😐

Today’s Weigh-in: -0.4 pounds from last week

Net Loss for 2012: 10.8 pounds  :mrgreen:

Last Week’s Exercise: 

  • 4 days of cardio (17.8 miles of walking & 1 elliptical day)
  • 0 days of strength training 🙁

Last Week’s Diet: terrible, as evidenced here, here, and other undocumented places!

Last Week’s Sleep: so-so…  😕


Goals for Next Week:

  • Exercise – get back into gear with my cardio @ 5+ days/week; kick start my strength training again (it’s been over 2 weeks!)
  • Diet – no more than one takeout meal this week (certainly not three!)
  • Sleep – I did happen to get a big project done over the weekend, and though I have many more left to do, still trying to slowly get this in line with something slightly less sleep-deficient…

Progress & Productivity

Even though it feels like it flew by way too fast, I feel like I had a pretty productive weekend.

We were going to go over to Disney again, but bailed at the last minute due to concerns about the weather and just ended up staying home. My wife picked up a copy of The Hunger Games and read it pretty much cover-to-cover, so I had loads of time to catch up on various creative projects and clear out some things that have been bogging me down for a while. I ended up finishing off two specific projects that have been on my list since god knows how long, and as I look ahead to what I want to tackle next, something very apparent hit me square in the face – I am absolutely horrible at setting timelines for my creative tasks!

Take the two that I had just finished up this weekend, for instance:

  • Task #1 – originally estimated to take “1-2 weeks” … final result: 4 weeks!
  • Task #2 – originally estimated to take “a few hours” … final result: 10-12 hours!

I’m just really bad at estimating how long these things take, sometimes even to the point where I think it might be hurting me in the long run because I’ll build out a timeline for the next six months and then find myself increasingly frustrated as I pass deadlines where I’m supposed to be moving on to other things and instead am still only halfway through the first. I’ve thought about just taking my original estimate and doubling it, but that seems a bit drastic when I’ve got some that are expected to take months, though I’d prefer them not to take up my entire year…

Then again, a big part of productivity in general, I think, is really a sanity factor and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about improving the quality of my work by means other than just dumping loads of time into it (i.e. getting more rest and relaxation), and so to an extent I guess part of me wonders if stress could ultimately play a role in that process, too. I remember hearing a story once about an auto repair shop who would always quote its customers as much as double the amount of time that they needed to do the actual job. The reason they cited was expectations – if you call a customer and tell him you need another hour, he’s probably going to be disappointed, however if you call to say that you finished the work early, that’s something to be excited about and ultimately helps to better promote their business because then they’ve got customers walking around saying that this shop always gets their car in and out ahead of schedule!

Granted, it might take a little getting used to – especially if you’ve got other shops to compare the work to, but in something like my case when it’s all just in my head, why not add a little extra padding to my own expectations of time spent? Worst case scenario, I end up needing every bit of that time and just make it at the buzzer, but admittedly it always feels good to finish early!

*Ahem* – almost always…

…perverts…

…I think I’m just going to go ahead and get back to work now…  😛

Chick-Fil-A vs. The T-Shirt Guy

This is disappointing because Chick-Fil-A makes absolutely delicious chicken. Still, I hope that the guy wins because I hate overzealous trademark lawsuits and it should be pretty obvious even to a lawyer in a $5,000 suit that there’s no chance for “brand confusion” between Eat Mor Chikin and Eat More Kale whatsoever.

Come on, Chick-Fil-A – don’t turn us off to your amazing food by being a legal bully just because you can afford a really good lawyer with $4 billion in sales… 🙁

Games, The Hunger

So last night I saw the movie that apparently everyone has just been raving about, and at the end, I honestly thought that it was pretty good.

It was the first time I’ve seen a movie opening weekend in, well, actually forever, so I was a little surprised at the line we had to wait in. The preferred showtime we had wanted was completely sold out, so we settled for another one an hour later and by the time we grabbed dessert and came back, there was already a line for our showing built up inside the theater. We only waited for maybe 20-30 minutes, though, so still nothing like what we’ve been through at any theme parks!  😉

Anyways, the movie itself was pretty enjoyable – a bit drawn out at some points (almost 2.5 hours long!) and certainly predictable at many others, but overall it was an intriguing story and I’m sure it’s going to do very well at the theaters because it kind of breaks the mold of so many blockbusters we’ve seen lately (i.e. vampires, superheroes, teen wizards). That said, not sure how it will do as a trilogy of movies – I honestly didn’t know until we left the theater that the books are a trilogy, hence all of the terse, cliffhanger-esque looks at the end started to make a little more sense … I’m frankly a little sick of trilogies and the such lately because a) most of the sequels usually suck, and b) I’d much rather have one excellent movie than an entire series of subpar ones strung out year after year after year.

Maybe I’ll try to read one of the books if I have some time – my wife started reading the first one today and she’s really enjoying it, and my sister-in-law who’s read the whole series said she liked the books better than the movies, though I suppose that’s really often the case. We’ll see – I’ve got a lot of other things I’d like to read someday if I can ever find the time, too, so in the meantime I just have to make due with the 2-3 hour summaries that Hollywood has for me…