Since you came along, you sexy thing

Did you know that August is the cheapest and best time of the year to buy a bicycle?  I did, so I just went out and bought a bike.  It was a tough decision among the many options and whether I wanted a road bike, mountain bike, or hybrid.  When it comes down to it, I love mountain biking, so I went with that option.  Check out this beautiful beast:

I went out on a couple trails on Sunday, made some adjustments, and I’m ready to tear up Michaux State Forest later today with Justin. 

Pray I return with no major injuries.  Rocks aren’t always as forgiving as you would like.

The Claptrap

I think that I am a somewhat creative person, and lately I've been thinking about putting that to the test.  I tried to do a little bit of writing, but that didn't work out all that well.  Mainly because I lacked the dedication.  It seems to me that my creativity exist better in short bursts, and it is in that spirit that I created my own web-comic.  For now, I plan to update it once a week.  I got 5 comics posted before revealing it to the world, so check them out and let me know what you think.  2 of the comics weren't as funny on paper as they were in my head, but they still might be worth a laugh.  I have 5 more written out, and ready to create, so I hope to keep this going for a while.

The link is in the menu bar above.  As a side note, if any of you are good with html and can figure out how to add a next and previous post button to the menu, that would be awesome.  There are links at the bottom of each post, but I would rather have them in the menu bar.

I hope you enjoy, and thanks for reading.

8 Hours is a Long Time

Today I wrapped up a few projects at work and decided there wasn’t enough time left to start something new. 

Sadly, I confess that decision was made at 2:00.

That next project had better be a doozy.  

Changes in Attitude, Changes in Latitude

Some time ago, soon after getting back from China, I decided I needed to change my lifestyle a little bit.  This is something that I mostly kept to myself because I didn’t want to go around telling people this and then fail miserably, but now that I have been relatively successful, I felt obliged to share it with the world. 

Simply making a small effort to eat healthy and exercise has not worked for me in the past.  I would also find a way to mess it up by being lazy or craving bad food.  This time around, I didn’t set a goal for weight loss, nor did I limit myself to any kind of fixed diet.  My changes in life started by the simple realization that life is much sadder when you wake up less than an hour before work or school starts.  I’ve done this my whole life.  Sleep until the last possible moment, wake up and rush around to get ready, and speed off to work or school just in the knick of time of often even late.  What I have found is that this practice evokes the feeling that your life is about work.  I wake up and work all day, I’m tired when I get home and do a few things until I go to bed and do it all over again.  My first lifestyle change was simple, wake up early enough to allow at least an hour of free time before work.  That one hour changes my reasons for going to bed at night and getting up in the morning, and it makes work feel like something I need to do in the middle of my day instead of it feeling like all of my day.

My other changes were a natural flow of that one decision.  In order to wake up in the morning and have energy to do what I wanted, I needed to get a good night’s sleep.  In order to get a good night’s sleep, I needed to get into a regular routine and most importantly, eat healthy.  Eating the right food in the day is the single biggest factor in the quality of my sleep.  Now I need to eat healthy, not because I want to lose weight, but because I want to sleep well and be able to enjoy life.  All I had left to do is figure out what to do with my free time.  Occasionally, I would just hang out or play some video games, but I ultimately discovered that the early AM in the summer is the best time of day to be outside.  Spending time outside led to a walk, which led to jogging.  I also decided that I wanted to get back into golf, and the early morning is a great time for that as well.  Now I am walking 18 holes of golf a week, and running 2-4 times a week.  With all of these things combined, I dropped 25 pounds in 2 months and I didn’t even set a goal to lose weight.  I have set some small goals here and there, but the only real goal I set was at the beginning of the year when I decided I wanted to run 365 miles in 2010.  I’m happy to say that I just finished mile 180 leaving me about 25 miles behind schedule.  That’s not too bad since I took off 35 days for the China trip and work travel.  I have also not counted any miles for sports or other activities like the 24 hockey games I’ve played which would easily compute to 2 miles a game.       

I have to say that life has been more enjoyable for the past couple months which is funny because I always thought being overweight was worth it to enjoy delicious food.  The only other life change I would really appreciate is moving out of central PA.  I’ve just been here for way to long and I would really like a change.  The opportunity to discover a new area, and make a town our home instead of Liz and Wes living where I grew up would be excellent.  I haven’t had very much luck in my job hunt, but I am hopeful for the right opportunity to come up in the not too distant future.  I have a meeting with my boss this week to see where she sees me a year from now.  Perhaps I’ll find that I need to stay here a while longer, or get an opportunity to transfer to a different location.  Worst case, I’ll discover that I need to kick my job hunt up a couple notches. 

With vacation days and family events over the past few weeks, I’ve dropped the ball a little bit on the front of eating healthy and waking up early.  I also haven’t applied for many jobs recently, so I hope to pick back up this week.  I did shoot an 89 this morning at Range End, so things aren’t going too bad.

Thanks for reading.  

Sorry

I often think of this cartoon when I haven't posted in a while.  Thank you XKCD for writing my blog for me.

Also, if you like XCKD, I found this very interesting website: http://xkcdsucks.blogspot.com/ I don't know why somebody would take this much time to express their hatred of something.  Not only are there general posts, but there is basically a post for every XKCD cartoon describing why they hate that specific cartoon and how it could have been done better.  Ultimately, it just make me want to read more XKCD, but it is interesting to read none the less.

Thanks for reading.

Man Weekend 2010

Man Weekend this year was a little bit different from last year, but similarly awesome!  There wasn't nearly as much fire and explosives, mostly because I didn't plan on as much, but also due to poor weather and malfunctioning fuse.  At the same time, the cannon was particularly fantastic!  9 of us set out for that hallowed ground in northern PA.  We kicked the weekend off with a nice round of golf followed by a lot of gun and cannon fire.

Unfortunately, I forgot my camera, but Keith was able to take a couple shots and videos along the way.

A good game of poker rounded off our first night, and we prepared for our main event day.  A good breakfast and a pancake battle led us into MAN-LYMPICS.  This great championship consisted of clay pigeon shooting, pistol shooting, bowling ball shot-put, football toss, longest golf shot, caber toss, and a game of poker.  I was way out in front in the beginning, but Jimmy made a triumphant comeback to claim victory.   In the middle of all that, we set off the cannon a couple times and  played a game of Ultimate Frisbee.

This is the best of the videos I was able to collect.




The weekend was a great success.  Keith had the great idea of making a short bar trip to a local establishment.   The stories and pictures from that gem of an event will be left off this blog, but you could only imagine what happened when 9 crazy guys loaded into the back of a pick up truck and ventured into a crazy redneck bar for a drink at the same time a bachelorette party dropped in.

Thanks for reading.

My Goal Deployment Training

A couple weeks ago I was offered the opportunity to join the top management of our company for special training for a new process to create goals and implement useful action plans.  The training was overall quite helpful and will hopefully be a useful tool for the people more involved with the operations.  My role was to add to the discussion and provide some financial analysis to the goals the teams were setting. 

I was quite proud of myself for my level of attention to these long meetings given my track record from school.  I had very little difficulty fighting off sleep despite the grueling 12.5 hour meeting on day 1 and 10 hour meeting on day 2.  However, I did find myself a little stir-crazy on the second day and started to doodle a bit.  As we walked our way through the 110 page power point, I couldn’t help but notice the ridiculous clipart pictures tossed in.  Some were just silly like a caveman chipping at a wheel demonstrating that we don’t need to “reinvent the wheel,” while others just came off creepy when printed without colors.  To entertain myself, I took to adding dialog to some of the pictures.  This one in particular was a gem to work with.  It came up every time we had a breakout group session:

Despite the concern I had that someone would pick up my book by mistake and see the comments, I pressed on.  Here are some of my cartoons I thought you would find amusing:

I’d love some reader input here.  The main reason I put the blank one on top is to get others to copy and add there own dialogue.  I don’t think you can embed the picture in a comment, but you can put it online and post a link, or email it to me, and I’ll make another post with reader’s cartoons. 

Thanks for reading.