Chapter 3 is up

I've written chapter 3. I've decided to put off editing the first 2 chapters for a while. I think it will be easier if I'm removed from them for a while. I've also decided that the book will be a trilogy about the order of Suun. Yu is an important figure in the order's history, so he'll be the central focus of the story. Its impossible to fit everything I want to fit into the book into a single book.

The Art of Peace

There are many books written by eastern philosophers on the subject of taoism, or in the spirit of taoism. Some of it is meaningless rhetoric, some of it is noteworthy, and some of it simply changes the way you look at the world. There is a difference between understanding taoism, and living taoism. In practice, it is harder than theory. Recently, I've read the art of peace, written by Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido martial arts.

One theme of the book is that a true warrior does not strive to win his battles, but only strives to achieve peace. Winning, and peace are not always the same thing. Winning may end the battle, but may not ease the tension, thus peace is not restored. This is clear in today's war with Iraq. If we win, it does not mean peace, it just means that we've repressed the enemy enough that they give up...for now. We should be striving for peace in the middle east, not victory. Victory in this case is nothing but a shiny bauble made of glass. Sure, it looks pretty, but its not good for very much in the end.

If your enemy approaches, greet them with a smile; if they walk away, wish them good will as they leave. The warrior who does not fight, is invincible.

The Hitcher

I'm usually not too fond of remakes, especially remakes of classics. The original hitcher was one of the most terrifying movies that I've ever seen, and the "truck scene" stuck with me since I've seen it. Psycho was a ruined remake, I didn't see "the fog" or "amityville horror" remakes, but I can't imagine that they live up to the originals. Actually, remakes, in general, are a bad idea, but whatever makes the studios money I guess.

The hitcher defies that logic. I actually think that the remake was a ton better than the original. The chick was hotter, the cars were cooler, john rider was more intense, the truck scene was....uh, the truck scene. Its a quality horror flick, if you're in the mood for that sort of thing.

Side note...post-gazette.com has a video of Mike Tomlin's press conference. I like the guy. I think the steelers made the right choice. He's got personality, he's funny, and confident, and respects the opportunity that he's been given. He knows that he's in one of the best franchises in football. He has a golden opportunity in front of him, lets hope he can take advantage of it.

I'm washing dishes...

...right now, as I type, because my dishwaher is installed and all preliminary indications are that it is installed correctly. This was a fun project because it incorporated just about every skill I've learned during homeownership. I had to cut out a part of my cabinets, install a new breaker, run new electrical wire and do the plumbing to hook it up. Now I need to figure out what to do with the portion of the cabinet that didn't get cut out but is no longer big enough to fit the old door/drawer.

Mike Tomlin is the new steelers coach. Funny thing is that the steelers message board is on fire with posts about whether his race is going to be an issue and blah blah. WTF? Its 2007 people, race shouldn't be an issue in anything. Its hard to believe that Pittsburgh is still so regressed in that respect. Anyway, queue blazing saddles: "A BLACK coach!?". "Coaches, we don't need no stinking coaches.". I'm excited, this guy is young, and smart, and apparently has a personality that would charm a rattlesnake. I just hope that he maintains the "team" concept that Cowher was so good at. Cowher's team's were never selfish, the wide receivers never yelled at the QB, and the defense never called out the offense or vice versa. Everybody shared responsibility. That's whats missing with so many other teams like the colts, and the bengals. Those teams are selfish.

OK, I'm done. My garbage disposal is also installed, its a new style unit that super quiet. I guess its redesigned from the way the old units work. It basically has 2 rotating hunks of metal that spin around. The bucket has small holes around it, and the 2 spinning hunks of metal keep mashing whatever you put in it until its in small enough bits to fit through the small holes. Brilliant.

Today

I will install a dishwasher and garbage disposal in my kitchen. I hope to complete this process with fewer than 3 electrocutions, 4 bleeding cuts on my knuckles, and less than 300 curse words. We'll see how that goes.

Then I'm going to finish rewriting chapter one of my book. I think I'll have pizza tonight. I've finally found a pizza place up here that makes a pizza that I can actually call "good".

Nissan 2.0

On tuesday, I will realize my lifelong dream of owning a nissan xterra. Yes, that's right, some people dream of being firemen or astronauts, but me, I just want an xterra. Why tuesday? Cause Martin Luther King was nice enough to ensure that the banks are closed on monday, but the downpayment is made and the sales contract is signed, so barring anything devastating happening to my credit, the deal should go through on tuesday.

I'll still have the altima for a while, so that kind of makes the xterra his little brother. I'll be damned if I'm going to trade in the altima for 500 bucks. I'm sure I can get at least 2000 out of it.

Food log.

Even when you're sure that you're eating healthy and staying under your daily goals for food consumption, its important to keep a food log. Why? Those "in my head" estimates don't really always pan out the way you think they should. Seeing the values of everything you eat can help you eliminate or replace things that are too high in a specific macronutrient. The best reason is that if you keep a food log, you get to find out at the end of the day that you are at 50% protein, 30% carbs and 20% fat, and still under 2000 calories! What does that mean? It means you get to eat pancakes to balance the protein/carbs!

Woot, there is no better surprise than finding out that you have room for more pancakes before you go to bed!

By my estimates, energy drinks were costing me anywhere between 60-80$ a month. Problem is, I'm addicted to caffein so I can't cut them out, I hate coffee, and soda isn't much cheaper. The solution? Something my sister showed me back on vacation. Sugar free energy drink mix packs to go. Good work sis!

Easing in.

Monday weigh in, total weight lost: 0 lbs.

Rule #1 of weight loss, report success, and failure, and everything in between.

Rule #2 of weight loss, if thursday starts with sing chow mei, friday ends with general tsos, quiznos and pizza are fit in on saturday and you still have pizza to finish off on sunday, you're probably not going to loose weight that week.

Of course, the encouraging part is that I ate all that junk and didn't gain any weight. I'm calling last week a reorientation, or an "ease in" back to weight loss.

A lot of people think that I don't need to loose any weight. That's cool, cause that means that you can't tell that I'm overweight. I'm ok with that, but it doesn't change the facts. Fact is, I could gain 20 lbs and people still wouldn't be able to tell that I was overweight, the flip side of that is that I could loose 20 lbs and no one would be able to tell either. That's just part of having my body type, which is long and lean. It takes a LOT of change to be noticable to anyone.

Got my blood work back today, and aside from my triglycerides being a little itsy bitsy bit high, I'm a well oiled machine. Can't wait to get my 1 year progress report!

Something funny

I can only assume that the "auto fill" items in my google tool bar are a list of the most common things typed by other users of google tool bar. Today when I was typing "How to put up crown molding", the top item in the list was "How to put on a condom". I didn't realize that there was any ambiguity to it. It seems that as long as you have the correct side "up", the rest works itself out. Maybe there are some really stupid people in the world, but you'd have to be really really stupid to not figure this out. I had this figured out at like 10 years old when we used to get condoms from the gas station and put them on people's door knobs(sorry, to those people by the way).

Oh yeah, and "Children of Men" opened yesterday at theaters everywhere. I can't wait to see it.

Played racketball tonight.

Damn, I'm in a zillion times better shape since I quit smoking. I was barely winded at all while playing. I had a hard time keeping my focus enough to win all the games, but I won half of them, and that's pretty good. Racketball is a great game, fast paced and intense. Speed and conditioning play a big role in the game, but neither is as important as a strong strategy. Racketball is like a high speed chess match. You're trying to catch your opponent out of position and take advantage of that. Get him moving one way and then strike the other way. Its a fine sport.

A side note, I added a blog for my book. There's a link off my profile. I don't expect noone to read it, but if you're bored, I'm all for criticism. Its more for me to have online so I can write it when I'm away from my home PC if needed.

Taking a crack at writing.

I've got crazy ideas in my head. Epic stories, adventures, blah blah blah. I've decided to write a book about them, or at least one small subset. I've been writing for the last couple months, and have a lot of stuff down on paper, but nothing was really flowing together the way I wanted it to. The story itself was in place, and all the pieces fit, but I found that actually telling a story is difficult through the written word.

Today I found a piece of software called newnovelist 2. It has tools for creating a database for you novel. In the database you can have all your characters, places, ideas, objects etc. It has several questions that it askes about the items that ensure that you think your characters through the whole way. I had my characters, and places and plot thought through pretty well, but getting all those ideas organized was proving difficult. Now, I have all my character development stored in an organized manner, so if I have to go back and see what I was thinking about a character and how he might react to a situation, I can just go and read my initial description of it.

Overall, I'm fairly impressed with the software so far. I'll probably never finish my book, nor get it published or even try to, but its fun to work on.

Venom? He don't have no robot body, and he's never attacked tokyo!

Your results:
You are Venom

Venom 69% Juggernaut 60% Dr. Doom 60% Apocalypse 58% Mr. Freeze 56% Magneto 55% Lex Luthor 50% Green Goblin 48% Dark Phoenix 47% Catwoman 45% Kingpin 43% The Joker 40% Poison Ivy 35% Riddler 35% Two-Face 32% Mystique 24%

Strength, disguise and adrenaline are your greatest weapons.

Click here to take the Super Villain Personality Test

We all scream for fat free frozen yogurt!

Easing out of eating like a pig is tough. You get stupid cravings for stupid stuff. My kryptonite is frozen stuff, and its entirely too difficult to find "sugar free" anything, let alone ice cream. So I settled for the fat free frozen yogurt stuff. Fat free is not an excuse for eating half of the half gallon. Other than that mis-step, my diet is on point....of course there's still half a container left in there.

Back on the wagon.

Today starts the start of being back on my weight loss diet. Not a new years resolution or anything, it just happens to hit the same timing as the end of my 3 months of strength training that required me to eat tons and tons of bad food.

My diet pretty much will look like this every day:

Drink - Water, water, water, and more water. If I'm not peeing every 2 minutes, its not enough water. If I get sick of water, I'll start flavoring my water with water, and drink more water.

Breakfast - PBJ baby, somethings never change.

Lunch - Some kind of chicken something or other with some kind of vegetable.

Dinner - Pancakes! I've found that if you take sugar free strawberry jelly, and mix it with some water until its liquidy, it makes hella good strawberry syrup.

Dinner could also be a chicken/pork/vege meal on days when I'm sick of pancakes.

When I'm hungry, fresh fruit fills the bill.

Sugar(other than fruit) is absolutely taboo. No bundt cakes, cookies, pie's, doughnuts or chocolate bars.

My workout changes from being heavily geared towards lifting heavy weights, to being more anaerobic lifting faster and longer to get my heart rate up.

With my new recipe books and stuff, its becoming a lot easier to cook tasty healthy meals. Sure I have to remove sugar, and oil from most things, but it usually turns out all right.

For the record, my starting point is 205. My goal is 190 by mid febuary without loosing any of my strength that I've gained.