Stream of...not Consciousness...well Whatever...

I don't like stickers.  Not one bit.

I miss eating like a fat guy sometimes.  Being able to just make or get something without having to think about it's value...it's liberating.

The guy that sits next to me at work hates Masterpoo Theatre.  Says it makes him uncomfortable.  I think he's just covering up for something.

I feel like, no matter what decision I make, it will ultimately be the wrong one, and that's a heavy burden sometimes.

The variety of sounds people make when they sneeze fascinate me.  Some people are somewhat mute, reserved...other people could use that sound as their superpower.  I've heard people create sneeze sounds that I'm pretty sure would incapacitate children and most dogs.

Scott doesn't have time for my shit.

Steph hates Muppets.  And then she tried to backtrack somewhat by saying "fyi - I watched the Muppet Babies cartoon religiously!  And I was 15 by then.  Or doesn't that count?  I can still sing the theme song.  I won't, but I could."  My response was 'That's like Goebbels saying "Sure, I gassed a bunch of them, but I love their bagels".'

Those two things aren't really similar in any respect.  Most likely downright offensive to many people.  See statement four.

This run by the Celtics since the all-star break has just been downright amazing.  They almost completely re-invented themselves.  I was not a big fan of Doc Rivers when he was brought on as the coach way back when, but he is definitely the right coach for this team at this time.

Why do some women walk like they are attacking the floor?  Like the floor burned their village and raped their mother when they were kids?  Seriously...you're like 130 pounds and you sound louder walking than I do, even when you are in sneakers.

The weather lately has sucked for running.  I actually begged off my scheduled run for last night, as intermittently throughout the day we had been getting surprise rain storms.  But I'm still on track, I think.  I got out Sunday for a good long run, but made the mistake of hitting the steepest incline RIGHT AT THE END OF MY RUN.  It was bad.  Pretty sure I was running slower than I could have walked it.  I only had a minute left, so I cut it off before my heart exploded.  It kinda looked like this:

MasterPoo Theatre #2: Braveheart

I apologize...not good with accents yet.

Masterpoo Theatre #1: The Shawshank Redemption

This might be my greatest idea ever. NOW WITH IMPROVED SOUND!

Good Days and Bad

I'm trying.  I really am.

I have good days and bad.  The last post...that was a bad day.

But, I have had some good stuff happen, I guess.  I received some good news on my financial front (a story for another post).  I also received some shirts and shorts from a coworker's husband, stuff he couldn't use anymore.  The shorts were mostly size 36, a size I didn't think I was anywhere near.

This is what I expected.

For shits and giggles, I tried them anyway.  They fit, no problem.  No wrangling and laying down or anything like that.  Just slid them up and buttoned.

So it's time to get back to what was working for me.

Firstly, though, is my left knee.  Last week during Burn Circuit 3, I hyper-extended it a little.  It was pretty painful and spent the weekend pretty swelled up.  So the Chalean program is taking a break this week while I make sure that knee is back up to par.  That may also be why my run Friday fell apart so badly.  Perhaps I was compensating for it without trying to and working harder than I needed to be.  That's just speculation though.

I couldn't run last night, due to time and rain constraints, but I will tonight, and I'm looking forward to it.

Learning to Remember Who I Am

I had been feeling pretty good about myself.

But, life has a way of reminding you.  Expectations vs. Reality.

This has been a very hard week.  With every win, there's been two bigger losses.  I'm down to 278.  Which means I've lost 8 pounds since last week.  Many people at work, friends of mine, were very complimentary to me this week about the weight loss.  It's noticeable.

I started the Chalean program a week early, just out of boredom.  And I crushed it the first two workouts.  The third one, Burn Circuit 3, struck back.  I hyperextended my knee about halfway through.  I had to cut off the last exercise group, which upset me.

I played basketball last night.  It'll be the last time with that group until it gets cold again.

I sucked.  Really.  Just terrible.  It's the worst I've played in a long time.  I should be better now.  At least not worse.  I can play harder and jump higher.  But my shot is gone, and my defensive instincts have seem to completely left me.  I was routinely beaten last night by moves that I used to be able to anticipate.  The only thing I could do to contribute was to make sure I got all the rebounds, which I did relatively well.

Then there's the car.  Massive fuel leaks.  From the lines on either side of the filter, from the sending unit on the top of the gas tank as well.  Also, one of the frame mounts was rotted off.  I could only afford to fix the lines and the frame mount.  The tank and sending unit will have to wait.

This was also week 5 of the couch to 5k program.  I crushed the first two sessions.  Today was the final one of the week.  The first one that was a full run, the whole time.  No walking sessions.  I was really pumped for it.  I just knew I was going to knock it out.

It didn't work out that way.

I ran for the first 12 minutes.  After that...I just couldn't do it.  I didn't have it in me.  It was supposed to be 20 full minutes of running.  In the program, the longest so far had been 8 minutes, which I did Wednesday with no problem.

But I couldn't do it today.  I failed.  And I failed hard.

I'm reminded.  Of who I am.  A man who lost his wife, and has his kids 50 per cent of the time.  I'm pretty much broke, left with two incomes worth of bills and only one income.  And I'm alone.  It sucks.  I'm tired of it.  I feel like every time I try to do something about it, life will remind me.

This is who I am.  Unfortunately, some days, it feels like all I'll ever be.

Wow, this was uplifting.  Sorry.

Burn Circuit 2 Redux

Last night was Burn Circuit 2.  I had mostly forgotten the exercises in this circuit.  They're all very taxing on your shoulders and back.  That means two things.

First, your form needs to be spot on.  Secondly, you're going to be sore.

And I am today.  My back and shoulders are extremely tight and sore.  My back mainly because my form was suspect on many exercises.  The running has made my legs more sore than the first time I went through this program, and I was in turn unconsciously compensating by not attaining a flat back for most of the row exercises.  When you do that, your back suffers.  It was enough that I had to pull back on one of the row exercises, only doing 8 reps.

I am, however, considerably stronger than I was the first time.  The first time through in Burn Circuit 2, there's a group of push-ups that I never was able to do on my toes.  Not a single rep.  This time, I did eight on my toes.  That's a big change, I think.

My flexibility is also much improved.  I can go much lower in many of the lunging type exercises, and in the stretches before and after each workout.

My weight loss has somewhat plateaued recently.  Mainly because I haven't been eating as well as I should have.  Unfortunately, money is going to be tight for the next month or two, and eating healthy is damn expensive.  I'll just have to keep a better eye on intake.

And, solely because I haven't done one in quite some time, here's a drawing:

Me riding a Space Unicorn.

Eagle Shots and Back to Work

So, this past weekend was Easter weekend.  The kids were with Amy for the weekend, so I was stuck looking for things to do.  Friday afternoon (had it off due to Good Friday), I worked on the HDR shots from the night before and checked out a blues band at Suzy's.  Saturday was tough.  I pretty much just finished up grocery shopping and did a bunch of cleaning around the house.  Mike texted me and said he knew a good place for some shooting the next morning.  So Sunday morning, Mike stopped by around 8:30 and we got under way for a place called Mud Lock on Cayuga Lake.  I think it was Cayuga.  It was definitely a lake.  Well.  It was at the end of a lake.  Shut up.

So we got there, and immediately saw the bald eagle nest atop a man made tower.  There were a nesting pair, a male and the much larger female.  I switched to my 75-300mm canon telephoto lens, which is a super-cheap lens, cranked up the ISO some to get a super-fast shutter speed, and decided to get some shots.  There were a few guys already there with REALLY IMPRESSIVE lenses.  Lenses I want.  Really badly.  Anyway, here are the shots I got.

Mike waiting for action from the eagles.

After we were done at the lock, we headed over to the Montezuma Wildlife Refuge.  Which I'm sure is exciting for many people.  Like, Mike, for instance.  Who got REALLY excited for a crane right near the entrance.  Not a mechanical crane, but a bird.  Which, yeah, I guess if you didn't grow up with them on the shore nearly every morning (like I did), it's exciting.

So we got up to the little visitor's center and hung out a bit.  A volunteer came out and started in on all kinds of crazy bird stuff.  He was saying stuff like "There's blah-blah beaked honey crested blah blah" and in my head all I'm hearing is "birds birds birds birds".  He was pretty excited about it.  Mike asked about the birds in the picture above, and the guy just said "Yeah, those are swallows".  He seemed a little let down that we obviously didn't share his excitement.  We walked a little ways to an observation tower.  And looked at birds.  And grass.  And birds.  And water.  And birds...in the grass.  And birds...in the water.

woohoo...

We then got back in Mike's car and headed over a little boat launch area for a final few pics.

So that was my Sunday morning.  It was a really good time.

But....

I was kinda bored in the afternoon.  I decided that I wasn't going to sit out a full two weeks before starting back up the Chalean Extreme program again, and fired up Burn Circuit 1.  And this time, I was going to do good before/after pics.

Ignore the potty chair.

Potty chair.  Again.  Stupid potty chair.

I did notice some things being different this time to last time.  Firstly, I need to up the weights across the board.  Secondly, I'm MUCH more flexible in these exercises, able to go to much farther in my range of motion.

Anyway, I'm back into the workouts, and pumped for it.

Happy Easter, Steph

Kate Upton...this is MILES better than her Carl's Jr. ad.

HDR Experiment

Let me preface this by saying that I'm not a fan of most HDR images.  They just tend to look goofy to me.  Now, the way I manipulate my images sometimes brings about an HDR (high dynamic range) effect, but that's not intentional.  It just kind of works out that way.

An HDR image is usually multiple images merged into one.  The images are bracketed at different exposures, and those exposures are put together so that you end up with an image that is supposedly the best overall exposure for the entire scene, preserving all the highlights without having any that are overly blown out.

Last night, with nothing really to do, I was browsing on the facebook, and saw that Mike had put a picture of the moon up.  Mike recently bought a nice ILC camera, and is immersing himself in this disease as well.  I thought, well damn, this is a really clear night...I should get out and give this a try.  I sent Mike a message and asked if he was down for some shooting, and he was in.  I met him at the Wegman's parking lot, and we scoped out some sites to shoot from.  We started on the top of the downtown parking garage, then headed more downtown to finish up.  Here are my shots (Mike hasn't posted any to his blog, dummy):

This one actually isn't HDR, but I like the light trails.

My Head on Things Continued

Kickstarter Arcade Project

Ok, most everyone that reads this blog probably knows me, at least in some manner.  They probably also know that I am a 'video game enthusiast'.  It's part of my nerd heritage, probably coming from Dad's early adoption and fervent defense of the betamax format and dedicated stereo room in the house in Chaumont.  That black globe-y thing with the multi-colored light bulbs that threw all the horseshoe image things on the walls and the mirror with the lights behind it that repeated the lights into infinity...very cool nerd-things.

This mirror...and it was cool as hell.

Having never really been able to acquire that piece of nerd-defining tech myself...that one item that stood out as saying 'Holy crap, this dude is possibly a little unhinged', an emptiness needed to be filled.

A couple years ago, I got my chance.  My wife (who still loved me at the time...or didn't...but at least liked me) had seen someone down the street had an arcade cabinet for sale.  An honest-to-goodness real live arcade cabinet, like the ones I used to kill time on in the arcade my uncle ran in Three Mile Bay.  I'd go into the arcade, drive my grandfather (who lived next door) nuts for quarters, fire up 'Electric Avenue' on the juke, and lose myself in Battlezone, Omega Race, or Burgertime for hours.

So I drove down to the place with the cabinet.  I knew it from the second I saw it that it was Data East cabinet, probably Bad Dudes or Robocop.  They're pretty distinctive, if not attractive, with a curved marquee and very definable lines.  The guy wanted 150 for it, it was a Bad Dudes and was working, but the colors were hosed and the artwork was all gone except for the marquee, which was broken.  I talked him down to 50 bucks and took it home.  I tweaked the innards some, getting the colors back to some semblance of normal, adjusting the pots on the monitor's neckboard, and was happy.  But I knew in the back of my mind, that once that sucker croaked, I was going to MAME it.  Meaning that I was going to put in a computer that could emulate thousands of arcade games.

It took about a year, but it finally croaked, and I put in a PC, all new controls, a PC monitor, and some other small tweaks, and MAXXX AWESOME was born.  And it is COOL AS HELL.  My piece of nerd-defining-tech.

Anyway, this is all just a really elaborate setup so that I can pimp someone else's Kickstarter project.  There's a forum that I read regularly about building arcade controls and the like.  Some of the people there are damn good at building these cabinets from scratch.  One of the coolest ones I've seen is a mini-cabinet, it's about 3/4 scale, maybe, and is perfectly kid-sized.  He designed artwork for it, the cabinet...everything, and it's kick ass.

And now he's got a Kickstarter project to sell kits made from the plans.  Go to his project,  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1604943853/american-ace-arcade , and help him out.  Back him.  Tell you what, if you back him to a level that gets you a kit, let me know, and I'll help you get the system together for the games.  It's really that cool.  This kit that he's trying to get the funds for is exactly the size of the next one I want to put together for the boys for their bedroom.

My Workout Sheets

So, Chalene (Tits McGee from the workout videos) is constantly harping on keeping track of your workouts via a log.  Well, I did that, and I'm going to show them here and see what we can learn from them.  First, the Burn Phase.

So probably the first thing you'll notice is that these are pictures.  Not scans.  I have a scanner that is part of an old inkjet printer.  THAT DISABLES ALL FUNCTIONS WHEN AN INK TANK IS EMPTY.  BECAUSE, YEAH, I NEED BLUE INK TO HELP SCAN SOMETHING.  Stupid.

Anyway, each phase has one of these overview pages.  Don't ask me why I circled that one on the bottom row.  I have no idea.

So here's the Burn Circuit 1 breakdown.  You'll notice that the first two weeks of each is crossed off.  I was using the resistance bands then, so the information didn't really apply.  You'll also see some notes I made myself.  Like in the push-ups, 'K' means on my knees, and 'R' means regular push-up.  Also, I noted that I was doing one exercise too fast, and that my form was off on another.  Good info.  I must have corrected that afterwards, as I didn't write it again.  You'll see that my weights also didn't really increase, as I only had them for two iterations of this circuit.

Burn Circuit 2.  Also some more notes, mostly about left knee pain.  You can see how it propagated from one exercise to the next.  A good lesson here.  Keep your form in mind.  You'll also see that I only commented on the extreme exercises if I did less than the three.

Burn Circuit 3, in which you'll see my first 'Crank it up, mofo' upwards arrow.  That means that the exercise was too easy for me at that weight, and to make sure I increase it next time.  On to the Push Phase, easily my favorite of the three phases.

Pretty much the same as before.  Nothing exciting here.

Push Circuit 1 had the v-press curls, which were murder on that left arm, as you can see.  Also, plenty of weight increases week to week.  About 10 pounds for each exercise.

Again, lots of weight increases.  No idea what happened on the one Frontal Shoulder Press in week 4.  Looks like I was pretty upset about it if I circled it.

Again, good weight increases and some helpful notes, although I have no idea what 'TJack' means.  Wait, I think that says 'back'.  Must be my back was hurting.  Dumbass.

You can see here in the Lean Phase where I started changing things up a little with the cardio workouts, adding in Runs and Basketball.  An effective and efficient trade off, I think.  I'll put an hour and a half of full court basketball against 45 minutes of cardio any day.

You can kind of see through the Lean Circuits that I was pretty stagnant with the weights.  I definitely did not do the Lean Circuit as well as I should have.

On this one you can see major letdown.  Check out my notes...didn't stretch multiple times after, skipped some extreme due to being tired...but...I did do this workout TWICE after playing basketball.  The same night.

Again, fitting with the theme that the Lean Circuit could have gone better for me.

So there were my workout logs from the first trip through Chalean Extreme.  I'll have these as a base to start from for the next run through, starting in a week and a half.

I Didn't Think I Had One of These...

Alright, being a complete and utter idiot...I didn't take a 'before' picture.  But, recently I spent some time converting my entire Lightroom catalog to DNG, and found one.  In all actuality, this is pretty much exactly the same as I was before I started the Chalean program.  Here it is, in all it's 'glory'.

Yeah, pretty damn frightening, right?  Anyway, here's the after, taken tonight with Conrad's help.

Now, the perspective is a little skewed, but there are some differences.  First, I can really see it in my face/neck.  Also, take my word for it, but the belly is quite a bit smaller.  Know how I can tell?  There's space between my arms and my tits.  I had hoped for a more marked difference, but I'll take what I can get. I wish I had taken a profile pic, as I'm sure that would show much more difference in my gut.

I also did week 4, day 1 of couch to 5k tonight.  It sucks with a cold.  At one point I just started drooling uncontrollably.  Constant drooling...I couldn't keep it in my mouth, it was just slavering out all over.  I probably looked like a damn basset hound.

Oh well, I finished it.

This is the Best April Fool's Video