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.

Just for Fun

For the past 2 months I have been working out at a gym 4-5 days a week. When I was just about to leave today, I had a peculiar thought and felt obliged to share with my reading community.

I work out at the same time each day, and there are some other people that work out at the same time I do, just as often. Here is the problem with that, I get there about the same time as 5-6 other guys and leave about the same time, and therefore change and shower around the same time. I find it very discontenting that I see the same guys naked on a daily basis. I really shouldn’t be seeing the same people naked day in and day out other than myself and my wife. Weird…. And gross.

That leads me to another point. Why do people like to make fun of the weight gain of pregnant women? I understand that it is very easy to do and often gets the cheap laugh. In fact, I’ve had to stop myself from doing it a time or 2, but what is there to really gain? Do people really think women appreciate or in some way actually find it funny that people make jokes at their expense… terrible.

I say this because I’ve seen it happen, but there is also a few wackos out there that like to make the cheap joke about a pregnant woman, and then move on to the husband. What are these people thinking??? “ha ha, which one of you is carrying the baby?” “Are you pregnant too?” Clearly I’m not, so you are just calling me fat, but think you can get away with it because you are near a pregnant woman. I bite my thumb at you! It has happened a couple times to me, but recently at a family event where an aunt that I only see once a year had the audacity to make one of these jokes. I responded with a joke, but was really tempted to hit her with a comeback. I’m a guy that appreciates awkward humor anyway, it would have been fun.

My immediate reaction that I was able to hold in was “no no, I’m not pregnant. I’ve actually lost about 8 pounds since my wife got pregnant. But thanks, I hate you too.”

I knew that would have been terrible, so was really tempted to come back with a joke about her age. Clearly women must enjoy jokes about their age as much as their weight. “I know I’ve gained a few pounds since the last time I saw you, but you have really aged in that time. I know it has only been a couple months, but it looks like it’s been years!” No doubt, she would have loved that.

My last response that honestly came to me in that situation, but I did not say: “I could see why it may look like I’m pregnant, cause... well… I ate a baby last night. Seriously, I think I have a problem… there may be a warrant out for my arrest.” If you don’t respond in anger and decide against jabbing back, you might as well get completely ridiculous. Maybe she’ll think I was telling the truth. She would never make fun of me again.

My last bit of fun is to share with you the pumpkin that I carved for Halloween. I must say, I am very proud of my work.

Thanks for reading!

Something About The Keg of Glory... No... Wrong Show

In response to Liz and Keith: I eagerly await the arrival of Kindle 2.0. Improved features and $100 less is right up my alley. I thank Keith for the compliment. It is true, I am bodacious. Liz, you should know this by now, and come to accept it, even appreciate it.

I’m sure my readers would be proud to hear that I took 1st place in my company’s Office Trivia Challenge. The event was a tremendous success. More than 30 people showed up to have some pizza and socialize. 15-20 of those people sat around the large conference table and watched the game in its entirety. The game itself was a DVD trivia game, which added additional entertainment for those watching because there were many clips from the show. We used a projector so everyone could watch. I thought the game was well constructed, but I did have a few qualms. There were 6 or 7 categories you could land on, but many of them had the same introduction video. It was nice in the beginning, but just wasted time later in the game because the videos were redundant and not funny anymore. All of the categories had an intro video, followed by a clip from the show, and a question. Occasionally the clip would be related to the question, and everyone enjoyed those, but most of the time the clip was random and the question was completely unrelated. My final qualm was the use of non-office related trivia. This happened 3 or 4 times, in one example they showed a clip of Pam and Angela at the vending machine, and then asked “in what country was the vending machine invented?” We never claimed to know anything about general trivia, the game was purchased to play Office trivia, and I think the questions should follow that guideline. There was also a clip of Jim playing a prank on Dwight followed by the question “who is the current Queen of England?” Not at all related, I found that odd, and somewhat annoying.

Despite these small shortcomings, I was able to collect more that 20 Shrute Bucks, get past Dwight and his challenging questions, and be the first to arrive at Michael’s Office to claim victory. I was given the gold medal which was a necklace of paper clips with a rubber band (unfortunately could not find gold yogurt tops). There was also a prize donated from our marketing department which was a very nice desk clock. It was in a small wooden box, and when you open the cover you find a stylish analog clock, and the company emblem on the inside of the cover. I was very impressed and glad to have claimed first prize.

Hardworking, Alpha Male, Jackhammer

Do you ever take online trivia quizzes when you are bored? I like them. Not only because I like to test my knowledge, but also because I remember lots of funny scenes from tv shows and what not. It is an enjoyable time. You know what I find particularly vexing? Getting your score for an online quiz and them not telling you what questions you missed or what the right answers are. C’mon people! That is nice that I scored an 18 out of 20, but if I don’t know what I got wrong, I’ll miss the question again if asked by another site. I do want to sharpen my knowledge, not just see how well I did. Frustrating.

A couple weeks ago I was talking to a co-worker, who is probably the closest thing I have to a friend at work, and I mentioned something about watching the office. A couple days later she came back and attempted to test how big of a fan I actually was. Her test was a simple question of what kind of office merchandise to I own. Apparently, another person in my office has a bobble head Dwight doll and some other memorabilia, along with an office trivia board game. I later found out that he got the game as a gift and hasn’t even opened it, but that was beside the point. I exclaimed that it was not a proper judgment on his fanitude and of course challenged him to his own game. He accepted the challenge and our co-worker who got us started on this decided she would be the moderator or official. We tried to set up a day to have this challenge over a lunch break, but it didn’t work out for the next 2 weeks because of business, vacation days, and what not.

After talking trash back in forth in office-ese we decided this needed to happen as soon as possible. We arrived on the date of 10/23 on our lunch break and we are going to get some pizza and have ourselves a showdown. In the following couple days, it crossed my mind that 2 people playing a trivia game and one person officiating might be a little lame. Since I’m sure that there are some other Office fans around, I started asking around to see if someone else would join just. There were a lot of people that had seen some episodes, but did not think that could really compete. Though they wouldn’t compete, they said they would come and hang out for the social event. Now we had 2 people playing, an official and 3 people watching. Finally we found a 3rd competitor. He was on vacation this week, but another co-worker assured us that he is a big fan and would be a fierce competitor, so he got volunteered. Now we had 3 players, an official, and 4 people watching. It occurred to me that other people might get left out, so we made the decision to go ahead and invite the whole office. I told our official to go ahead and send out a mass email.

The result, of course, was not what I was expecting. Instead of inviting others to join in on the game, she invited others to have pizza and watch the TWI Office Challenge. Now I have people coming up to me in my cubical and saying they are routing for me and hope that I am studying up. One guy even said he has $10 riding on my victory. Instead of a fun game among co-workers, we have an all out challenge between 3 people representing different departments with an official, support people, and fans to watch. Talk about pressure. I really need to re-watch some episodes to be on top of my game. On top of all of this, the CFO, Treasurer, and VP of our company each picked their own person to rally behind and told us that they would “sponsor” the event by paying for the food and drinks. It is amazing how this thing escalated. I was going to play a bored game with a co-worker or 2, and now I have corporate sponsors, fans, and people betting money on me. Absolutely Ridiculous!! Though it is really exciting and I think we are going to have a lot of fun. There has also been talk of getting some awards from our marketing department.

I get to take off work Monday – Wednesday for a vacation with Liz and her parents. I’m really looking forward to some time off and good fun with family. Plus my sister is getting married tomorrow, so there is all kinds of excitement going around. I think I’m going to have a lot of fun over the next 5 days, and after it is all over, I am going to come back to work and compete in the greatest trivia challenge of my life. Or possibly second greatest compared to Ali’s trivia madness over the holidays. Of course, I didn’t have corporate sponsors for her event.

Just Like I’m Walking On Broken Glass

I got my Zune in yesterday!!! It is AMAZING. I am so glad about my purchase, and I can’t wait to really dive into the features and see what it can do. My only problem is the battery life. It is decent if you just listen to music, but watching videos and playing games as I will be doing often really kills the battery. It only last a little over 4 hrs playing straight video. I will definitely need to get something to extend the life of it if I am going for a long trip in a plane or something.

Why am I walking on broken glass? Because it seems every piece of glass I touch becomes broken. I have already described what happened to the Zune. As a side note, the thing was pretty solid. I dropped it multiple times and never even noticed a scratch. I’m not sure exactly what happened when the screen broke. I think it was somewhat of a freak incident where I happened to put the right amount of pressure in the right spot to ruin it. None the less…. Broken glass.

On Saturday of last weekend, our sliding glass door in the back of the house shattered. Liz and I weren’t around when in happened, and actually didn’t even notice it until the next morning because we got home late. Here is a picture of it. It is the same picture that Liz has on her blog.



It was actually very fascinating to look at. Clearly it started as a small web of cracks and expanded to cover the entire door. If you stood next to it and were quiet enough, you could here a new small crack form. A new one would form about once every 20 seconds.

Since bad things always happen in threes, you know this isn’t over yet. On Sunday night, yes the night of the same day we discovered the screen door. I broke the LCD screen on my work computer. We were about to go to bed and I decided to turn a movie on my work computer, it was just convenient at the time because our personal computers were malfunctioning / being used for another purpose. I was sitting on the floor setting up the movie, and then went to pick up the computer and put it on our dresser. I grabbed a hold of it from the top of the screen (as I do with my personal computer all the time, but highly recommend not doing) and I pinched a little to hard…. and crack. It was actually quite similar to my Zune. The outside didn’t crack, but the pressure on the screen broke the LCD behind the protective screen. There was just a small crack, but on an LCD, the whole picture is ruined. I just sat there in shock. I can’t believe I just busted my work issue computer…. By means of broken glass!! C’MON!

I promise I’m not a klutz. These were just very unique, and odd occurrences that happened to fall near each other. Though I am happy to report that everything is back to normal. I have my new Zune, we called the landlord and he just finishing replacing the door today, and my office called in their dell guy to replace the broken screen yesterday. Luckily, no one cared that much at work, they simply accept that accidents happen. Plus our new door is much nicer than the old one. I guess it worked out overall. No harm done at work, and much improved sliding glass door with an actual working screen, and a sweet new Zune. Not bad, but I do tense up a little bit when I’m next to a window or closing my car door.