A Card Carrying Member of The Nerd Herd

In case you did not know me in high school, you should know that I am, and have recently proven again to be a member of the Nerd Herd. You may be embarrassed, or quiver in disgust of my self proclamation of being a nerd, but I urge you not to fret. The Nerd Herd was not established due to looks or popularity. They are merely an elite group of individuals who at one time walked the halls of Boiling Springs High School, had surprisingly high intellect, and of course, always had a good time despite the lack of fun things to do in their town. True, some of these individuals may freak out over the mere mention of Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, some can do ridiculous things with computers or solve math problems that would make your head spin, and others would spend an obscene amount of time drafting articles of membership to these groups we made up, or planning to the very infinitesimal detail a minor prank that would most likely go unnoticed. Despite these facts, I ask you readers not to judge these great men wrongly. For many of them are now doing your taxes, teaching your children, designing the buildings around you, healing the sick, and preaching God’s word.

From time to time, I like to prove that I am in fact worthy of such a membership. For I, am addicted to MS Excel. I have spreadsheets that monitor many aspects of my life. Not only do they keep track of all of the data, but they have preposterous formulas laden through intense models to make the data collecting faster, summarize everything, and spit out statistics that the average person would never care to know.

Soon, I am going to have the wonderful privilege of being a father. I am so excited about that privilege that I can hardly contain myself. The things I am going to be doing and the responsibilities that I am going to have are simply fantastic. Due to my nerd-osity, one of the things I am honestly excited about is the opened avenue of new spreadsheets. Do I know exactly how much we have spent so far on medical bills, baby furniture, and other preparations for the birth? Of course, but that is just a small part of it. One of the important tasks of a father during the labor process is keeping track of contractions. 1 min. contractions, 5 min. apart, lasting for more than an hour. That is the goal. That is the moment that you know the baby is going to be coming soon enough that it is time to get your wife to a hospital.

How does one keep track of this time? Just feel it out and leave when it seems like you’ve reached that goal? Use a stop watch and scribble down numbers that you won’t be able to read later? Of course not! You have to make a spreadsheet…. And it has to be easy, and awesome. That is exactly what I created… “The Awesome” when it comes to a contractions spreadsheet. This beast does it all on one page. Click the start button, click the stop button, and that’s it. It keeps track of all of the contractions and summarizes the progress in one simple place. You know at any given moment the number of contractions, total time since first, average length of and between since the start and average length of and between on a floating hour basis. It monitors these things on an exact date and time basis so later you can tell the kid exactly what moment things started and when it was time to leave for the hospital. If you don’t think it would be too hard to create such a thing, then you are off. This involves macros with loops to create a place for the next contraction, and some pretty tricky formulas. Here is an example of just one of the formulas I used:

=IF(A8="","",IF(ISERROR(VLOOKUP("here",I9:I5001,1,FALSE)),IF(B8<(SUMIF(H:H,"here",B:B)-(1/24)),"here",""),""))

And one more for fun:

=ROUND((AVERAGE(INDIRECT(M19&":"&N19))-ROUNDDOWN(AVERAGE(INDIRECT(M19&":"&N19)),0))*60,0)&" sec"

So there you have it, I am a nerd. But I am proud of it. In fact, I am so proud of it that I would gladly send anyone interested the file so you can enjoy it in all of its glorious majesty.

I can’t wait until Liz starts going into labor so I can start to utilize this tool.


…. Don’t judge me.

Thanks for reading

Ellipticals = A Chasing Of The Wind

If you have been reading my blog lately, then you know that I have been working out at least 4 days a week for a solid 2.5 months. My body has consequently been very angry at me for about 2 months. You would think it would celebrate my efforts to tone it up and make it run better, but there has been no celebration, only pain.

For the first 6-7 weeks I got into a consistent rhythm of 3 days of full cardio and 2 days of lifting with short bursts of cardio. I thought this would be a good system. A little over 50 % of my cardio workouts were spent on a treadmill and the rest was split between ellipticals, biking, and an arc trainer which is basically an elliptical stairmaster. After a few weeks, my knees were killing me. I’ve never had any problems with knee pains, and suddenly they we both causing me daily problems. I guess I’m getting old or something. I tried to look past it because I was progressing nicely. My times were getting faster and starting to look decent enough to say that I was in shape and I was losing about a pound a week. I wanted to be losing more than that, but I was simply unable to give up the foods I love for more weight loss. I cut out a bit of soda and had healthy lunches, but dinner was a different story, and weekends were just a mess. Despite all of that, I was fairly happy, except for my painful knees.

After complaining a little bit to Liz, she informed me that treadmills are normally bad on knees. I never knew. Despite the progress I was making, I knew I had to make a change. I kept the same schedule, but took out the treadmill and filled it with more time on the ellipticals. After about 3 weeks of non treadmill exercise, I am unhappy to say that I have been wasting my time. I try to work hard on these machines and keep my heart rate up, but the bottom line is: after 3 weeks I gained back most of the weight I had lost in the previous 7. How frustrating! Granted I had a couple of bad weekends of food in there, but not bad enough to make this much of a difference. Since nothing else has changed, I believe I can firmly say that ellipticals do not deliver anything near the same results as running on a treadmill. I really wish they did, because it doesn’t hurt as much and I rebound faster, but time on these machines has proved to be meaningless! Not only did I gain weight, but I am no where near as in shape as I was 3 weeks ago.

I have therefore decided to bear the knee pain and whatever else befalls me, and spend all of my cardio time on a treadmill. You may hear me by the end of this week from wherever you are wallowing and crying, but I think this is a necessary adjustment. I will update this in 2 weeks to see if my theory proved true and I get back down to where I weighed 3 weeks ago.

Wish me luck, and pray for my knees.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you take this lesson to heart if you start working out in a gym.

Whoa

You may not know this, but I’m seriously going to be a father… like soon! Liz is due in 4 weeks! I’ve been talking to some friends recently and have been posed the obvious question: “Are you nervous?” To be honest, I’m not really. Maybe I should be. Perhaps I should listen to all those people that exclaim raising a child is hard work and a lot more challenging than I could ever imagine, but I don’t really think that is true. The baby eats, sleeps, and poops. I know my schedule is going to change, and I’m going to be a lot more tired, and I don’t get to do some of the fun stuff I do now, but I’m ready for that. I may be a little nervous about holding him for the first time for fear of dropping him or not supporting his neck correctly, but I’m confident that will come naturally. To be honest, I’m much more nervous about the whole child birth process. I am much more worried about how good of a support person I will be, and how I will deal with my wife being in excruciating pain. I don’t think I have much to be nervous about for the actual child raising party. After all, a lot of people much dumber and lazier than me have had kids, and many of them even turned out fine.

Anyway, Liz and I put together our little one’s crib. My parents graciously purchased it for us, but we had to order it, and it just came in. I was so excited to put it together and feel fatherly, and look over the nursery with a sweet new crib waiting to hold our baby. What a great feeling! It was actually really easy to put together and didn’t take much time at all. Here are some pictures of Liz standing by the finished product. Isn’t Liz beautiful? And an awesome crib to boot!


It just crossed my mind that in 4 weeks I will probably no longer be a WAM (see Keith’s blog). Technically I still fit the criteria, but I think the birth of my son will probably re-class me. I shall now be referred to as a WAD. Yes, a White American Dad. Whoa! Chew on that thought for a little while.