Eighty Years (or so) To The Big Zero

So I filled up the tank in my brand new Toyota Corolla a week or so ago (check the Daily Commute for an exact date).

I went to a Murphy Gas station which are the stations just outside the Wal-Marts. They have the most inexpensive gas in town. I also noticed a new sign when I filled up - “Now with 10% ethanol.”

Well I think my car doesn’t like the gas because it’s hesitating when I start it. It’ll skip a little and I actually have to pump the gas pedal some. When I first got it I would simply turn the key and it would start. Now it takes a moment.

I think the 83 percent gas is not playing well with the new car. I’m still gonna get 83 percent but I’m not going to get it from Wal-Mart anymore. I’m thinking Chevron and fill up with a tank of their fuel cleaning gas with Techron. See if makes a difference.

I’m at less than a quarter tank now so I’ll be filling up tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes.

In other news I’m becoming very bored with my exercise routine. I stopped running because I was constantly dredding the walk/run time. So I backed off and am simply walking again. I still am only able to do 7 push ups, although they are becoming easier it’s not smooth and I’m winded at 7. I also stressed out my lower abs with the sit-ups. I think doing incline sit-ups really focuses the lower stomach and inner thigh muscles because they are hurting. If you take a look at the Road to Mt. Olympus you’ll see a couple mornings/nights were I skipped the sits and push ups. I need to let the muscles heal up some.

Some days are better than others.

This weekend I cleaned my living room of stuff and took it to GoodWill. I think I’ll be able to get at least $8000 in tax right offs with the stuff I pulled in. 8^) That side of the living room looks much better now. At least it’s not so cluttered. I think getting rid of stuff and having an empty clean space feels better than working out and getting in shape. Does anyone else feel like there’s just so much “stuff” going on around us and in our lives these days? I can’t be the only one with this feeling.

There’s a pressure of minutia that is incessent these days. Oh great, now I’m in a mood. Terminator better come on soon so I can get to bed.

I watched Jericho the other day online. I can’t stay up to 10pm to watch the show so I have to watch it on the cbs.com website. They allow you to stream it. But Fox requires you to download and install their own special player to watch shows. Bastards. No wonder people use bittorrents.

I better go before I get too worked up and start spoutting off like Howarth Beale.

Before I go though, I saw this amazing show on PBS called Ape Genius. It was fantastic. Everyone should watch this program.

** Speaking of crazy talk - if the solution to this economic downturn we’re having in America begins to sound like the Politicians are promoting a new currency to better stablize the future economy you’ll know all we’ve gone through these last couple years has been just part of the plan. You heard it here first. Crazy Talk I know, but still… who’s to say?

A Whole New You, The Daily Commute, Thinking out loud

I was given a one dollar bill the other day with a “Where’s George?” stamp on it. I went to the website and entered the bill.

http://www.wheresgeorge.com/report.php?key=f65c679f1187333606da53ce7eac7afdb6678b7f945dcd0a

This site tracks where bills are used and where they go around the country/world. I’m not sure how many people are actually still using the site but it’s still active and I just put the bill into a vending machine. I’m curious to see where it ends up next.

Saw the Lunar Eclipse last night. My first. Then we turned the telescope to Xibalba - a very important star in the Mayan culture - which is at the end of the Little Dipper. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xibalba

This star was a central component of the movie The Fountain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountain_(film)

If you haven’t seen this movie you may want to take some serious uninterrupted time and watch it. Then come back in a few days and watch it again. And after that time (and discussing it with friends/family) you may want to do some research about the mythology surrounding the star and the Mayan culture then REALLY sit down and watch it. There are so many layers to this movie it’s impossible to get it all in one sitting. It’s not just a sappy love story for Wolverine.

Thinking out loud

Yesterday two good things occurred. One was planned and the other was not.

First the planned one: I got my refund check from the IRS last week. I put most of it down on my one remaining credit card and reduced the balance by a little over 55 percent. I’ll have some very comfortable payments for the next couple months and it should be completely paid off by July. This is important for many reasons. The primary one being I now have a car payment (plus insurance for a new car) so my budget has been squeezed a bit.

The second thing that happened was at work. I was coming out of the staff lounge and heading down the hallway when a fellow worker who was further down the hall was headed toward me. When we met in the hall he said “Hey have you lost weight? I didn’t recognize you when I first saw you coming out of the door.”

I was like - “Really? Thanks. Yes I’ve been working out.” And he replied. “Well it’s surely working. I hadn’t seen you in a while and I wasn’t sure it was you for a moment there until I got closer.”

Now that’s cool!

As you can tell from my Road to Mt. Olympus tracking I haven’t really lost a whole lot - about 3-5 pounds on any given week - but I’m definitely slimming down.

Then that same day I had just gotten home and was about to go on my walk when I head some birds in the back yard. I looked out back and there were dozens of vultures sitting in the trees and even walking around the ground. I went out and they were cawing and fluttering their wings and just hanging out in my back yard.

I went toward the trees they had roosted in and was walking underneath them but they didn’t move. I looked into the sky and more vultures were overhead. I was sniffing the air for death, and looking at the grounds for some dead animal. I was out there about five minutes when suddenly they all started to move on. Some took off and flew into the sky while others simply moved to jump from tree to tree.

Circling off in the distance I saw a few more vultures and the ones from my yard started to join them. Then a hawk started to screech in a tall tree nearby.  I’m not sure if it was the hawk or they were simply resting but almost all at once they were gone and large cyclon funnels of birds were springing up in different areas of the sky. It was like out of a King novel or something.

I hope they had just needed a place to relax after a hard journey of eating the dead. I still have all my cats so I know it wasn’t that.

A Whole New You, The Credit Trap, Thinking out loud

I walked the Leon County Sinks Geological area this morning. It was very cool. I’ve done it once before but not like this.

It’s a wonderful area of forest, grasslands, and swamps with huge sink holes scattered throughout. I took the trail with a friend because we are working on getting in shape for a week long camping trip up north. Periodically when we would come an interesting hill or rise I would sprint to the top. I must have sprinted at least 20 times during the over five mile hike. It had to be at least a mile of running through the forest. It’s so much easier to run in the woods than it is to run on the road. It’s a completely different feel. I really enjoyed it and may do it again. It costs three dollars to get into the park though so I’m not sure if it’ll be a regular thing, but still it’s a great nature hike.

Mid-way through the trails we kept saying, “Man where’s the camera.” We should have brought a camera and took pictures because then I could have included pictures in this blog post rather than boring old words. Oh well, next time.

We’re doing the Garden of Eden trek in two weeks so I’ll have some pictures of that. On a good note, I was hardly winded for most of those sprints. If I had done this a couple months ago … well I wouldn’t have been able too. The Road to Mt. Olympus is getting easier.

Darn, we shouldn’t brought a camera.

Later.

A Whole New You

Thanks for the congrats on the Sun Room cleanup but don’t turn around into the room behind it. 8^)

I’ve got a small stack of boxes in the bedroom but last night I started to tackle that as well. I have my situp bench, push up posts and weight bar in the sun room now.

I’m thinking I’ll do the 3rd bedroom next since it’ll really free up space for lots of other stuff. Besides I need to find the title to my old car so I can sell it. It’s in that 3rd bedroom somewhere.

I went to Dothan over the weekend last (9Feb08) and went to a waterbed store. The technology in waterbeds has really improved. I’m very excited about the Laurel something something set I saw. It’s like a regular mattress but in waterbed form. No wooden railings along the edges - which I really didn’t like. The bed I’m looking at is so much like a regular mattress you only know it’s a waterbed once you lay on it.

A couple months before I save up the cash for that though. But when it’s bought and set up it’ll be awesome! There’s no way I’ll be able to break water. I’m not that heavy.

My drivers license expired in July of 07 so when I went to get it renewed there was a small fine of 1 dollar. (It will cost 37 dollars to get a new title for my Geo if I can’t find it. Plus I found out the bank still has a lein out against my car because they never filed the paperwork with Leon County. That paperwork is also with my title somewhere in the 3rd bedroom. I should write a story about the 3rd bedroom. It would be a horror story of course and there will be much abandoning of blood and items taking place in the room.)

Anywho… my drivers license was taken five years ago. I got my picture taken just this week for my license and there is a noticeable reduction in the width of my jowls. 8^) Seriously I appear to have lost some weight in the five years since drivers license photos. I’ll upload photos when my internet connection get fixed.

I noticed a slow down in my internet connection. I have 5mb DSL and it was tracking 78kb to 128kb which is very very slow. 5mb is 5000kb. So I call Sprint and we do some stuff and now I have no internet at my house. They are sending me a new modem and we hope that whatever was done during our testing gets undone and I’ll get internet again. We’ll see.

Well back to the grind stone. Gaming tonight. Looking forward to get. Get to make a new character.

Thinking out loud

My sun room is 95% cleaned up. I still have some items across the top of the bookcases but until I clean the 3rd bedroom those items will have to wait for their new home.

As you can see this room is a pig sty.

It slowly became cluttered and before I knew it I couldn’t use it. You’ll notice the sit up bench to the right. I would make my way through the maze and do my sit ups on that bench. The shelves became a nestling place for any random book/magazine that made its way into the house. I’m telling ya we have too much stuff! Or at least I do. I really want to reduce the amount of stuff I have but I am not at the point where I’ll just get a big dumpster and toss everything.

I’d like to get some value back from all these items scattered around the house. But fret not, I have a plan. I’m going to build a website were I can auction off all my stuff. People will be able bid on the items they want. I may even open it up for other people so they can auction their own items on the site. I’m in the process of working out the schema and such for the database and web design layout and functionality but when it’s completed it’ll be awesome I swear. It’ll be huge! I should probably check and make sure there isn’t another site similar to this though. It’s always good to check for your competition when building websites on the web.

So in between working on this auction site idea I have cleaned the sun room

and marked it off in my Mind Map Priority and Projects page:

On other news my Geo Metro has been retired from active service. It was time. 

I got a 2008 Toyota Corolla. I’ll take pictures eventually. But basically go to the Toyota website and look at the 2008 Corolla’s and choose the Desert Sand color and that’ll be my car.
(Maybe now women will unlock their front doors when I go to pick them up for our dates. 8^)

Here’s something cool.

The January numbers for my trek to Mt. Olympus. I had a total melt down this last week as far as walking/running goes but I’ll get back on the calves and knees and feet again this week. I maintained my other routine though.

I think I’m going to stop doing the Dips in favor of Military Presses and Arm Curls with the weight bar. It just seems more balanced. I’ll do push-ups every morning but the weight bar in the evening. We’ll see.

In other fronts the cookie jar was stolen. Well it wasn’t stolen but it might as well have been - it was definitely raided. I had to pull money out of the jar to cover expenses for the month of January. I didn’t get paid in January since in my job we get paid twice in December. It’s a holiday thing that totally screws up the ledger. Most of the expenses were unexpected bills, gas, and food.

So that withdraw is reflected in the Cookie Jar page.

That’s ok. This month will be much better. My auction website idea will see to that. 8^)

A Whole New You, The Daily Commute, Thinking out loud

I have been away for about a week. I’ve still kept up with my exercises (mostly) and my Geo Metro went to the shop with some serious impact.

I’m heading out to disc golf in half an hour but when I get back today I have some updates:

Mt. Olympus updates wrapping up last month and starting this month.

Cookie Jar update

New Mileage chart since my old chart is no longer valid. (see above)

And I get to tick off one of my items in the Mind Mapping graphic:
 

Until then thanks for reading and I’ll be back. (Minus the truck through your living room window.)

Thinking out loud

Taxes - Done.

Earliest time for me ever.

If approved I think I might be able to pay off these cards yet.

My business actually made money last year. But my expenses for advertising far outweighed what I brought in.

This year I hope to swap those numbers a little.

Off to a Super Bowl Party.

Thinking out loud