Long time coming
So I don’t blog enough. Sorry… Let’s start with a quick update.
Carley ran ten miles yesterday. yeah… ten. She made it look easy. Bella may have run nine… we’ve no way of tracking her and she is in constant motion… marathon training seems to be going well.
The weight tracker over there actually hasn’t been ignored… I’ve hit homeostasis. I tested this by eating super healthy and upping my exercise… I lost 1 lb in 3 weeks. I then spent 3 weeks being a total sloth… I gained that same 1 lb… So I stopped updating it because I stopped changing. This changes today. I’ve started tracking my food intake much more seriously (I’m going to find a way to link my food journal to this site) and I’m going to be doing different types of workouts to increase lean muscle mass and reduce my body fat. I’ll be keeping you guys posted on my body fat percentage, my pounds, and I may even start measuring my waistline and posting that as well. I’ll try to update about my workouts and what I’m trying as well as the results I’m seeing from each change.
Addendum-
At my gym at work, they had us do new years resolutions. I usually eschew these but I decided to go ahead with it this year because it will keep me accountable. My fitness resolutions this year:
1- Be down to 215 by Carley’s marathon (may 3)
2- Do a century (ride my bike 100 miles in a single day. I’ve done this once or twice before but never with actual hills)
3- Be able to do a set of 5 pull-ups by June 30
4- Ride my bike to the coast (this is only about a 50 mile ride but it crosses the coastal mountain range so I’d have a few hundred feet of hills to climb)
5- STILL be at 215 at Christmas.
Jake and I have been more successful than I could have hoped with our little business venture. We won’t be quitting our day jobs or anything, but we’re in the black and have stayed there. It’s a beautiful thing and we’re both learning a lot while polishing our resumes. pwnage.
Now a little rant. At least I hope it’s little… Actually I don’t.
We (as Americans) are big fans of ourselves. We are pretty sure we rock. And in a great many senses, we do. The problem is that we have stopped earning it. Previous generations of Americans have earned that legacy through civil rights progress, educational rights progress, scientific research, technological advancement and sundry other forms of hard friggin work. My generation (and to an extent the generation preceding mine) has this sense of entitlement handed down to us. The problem is, we got that sense of entitlement without the work to earn it. To put it bluntly, America did not become the greatest nation on Earth by saying, “Hey! We’re the greatest nation on Earthy.” We got it by working for it. By earning it. By proving it every day. We led the world on innovation after innovation. We earned our freedoms and understood that with those freedoms came responsibilities. In the past fifty years, we’ve forgotten the second half of that equation. We want our freedoms but we don’t want the work that comes with them. We want to drive what we want, when we want… but when it’s time to build new roads, we don’t want to pay for it- neither monetarily nor by giving up three feet of our front yard. We want the best schools in the world but we don’t want to pay an extra 100 bucks a year on our property taxes and there’s no way we’re going to march into the living room, turn off the TV and say, “Let’s look at your homework.”
When did it become ok to get what we want without earning it? If your parents leave you a huge inheritance, good for you. But what do you do when that cash runs out? You go get a job and start earning your own way. As a culture, we’ve been riding on the inheritance our grandparents and beyond spent their lives building for us. The problem is, we’ve been drawing on that currency for fifty years without putting enough back into it. The deficit spending is not just a governmental and monetary thing. We have been functioning on a moral deficit and on an ethical deficit for far too long now. We can either start earning our keep and trying to replenish the coffers, or we can go completely bankrupt and give up.
I’ve never been a fan of the easy way out.
January 5th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Heh, you’re right-on, every word of it.
I had a friend today tell me that this economic mess is due to “Tax-and-Spend Liberals”. Literally. Right to my face. I’m going to post a rant on my own site very soon about reducing complex economic and political situations to (largely inaccurate) two to four word catch phrases, and I’m going to post another rant about blaming one party in a complex economical and political situation where many parties and unavoidable events are to blame, but the point I’d like to make right here and now is that taxing and spending is a HELL of a lot better than just spending!
January 5th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Actually, Joe, not spending would trump all of it, but we can’t do that. For once I actually agree with my little brother. And this is speaking as someone who is applying for unemployment today.
The sense of entitlement not only means there’s less that’s being produced in terms of actual goods as well as leadership and responsibility, but the value of those things is diminished. Which is why almost everything is considered disposable. Electronics, water bottles, marriages, people in other countries, poor people in our own…
January 5th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
I saw a short TV article on Barney Frank a few weeks ago (“60 Minutes”, I think), where he had one brilliant comment. He said that TV is enemy of nuance, but nuance is where the truth is. People don’t want to dig and find what are really the complex variable, they want to blame someone and move on.
jte
January 6th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Increased wellness is on my TO DO list too. I’ll bring my workout clothes when I come visit you in a couple of weeks. You can drag me to the gym and running track and feed me healthy foods too! No getting lazy because Mom is visiting!!!
January 8th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
And of course there is also that American tendancy to say things like “we’re the greatest nation on Earth” …