Are those ladies topless?

So I've been fighting off a head cold, while worrying about the washing machine backing up through the toilet.  I got home from work and DaNae was planted downstairs to make sure nothing happened while doing the laundry.  She came up stairs to see what I was doing and told me how she had found a children's movie on netflix and was watching it.  She went on to tell me about it.

I wasn't too interested as I just wanting something to drink and get refreshed, then go relax.  I sat down on the couch downstairs after hydrating and checked out this movie DaNae was so excited about.  After about ten minutes I saw a guy passed out from a heroin injection, a guy named muff diver and a guy who used profanity every couple words.  I was a little surprised by what was being passed off as a kid's movie these days.  I definitely thought it was weird but decided not to say anything. But then the main characters enter a topless bar and I turned to my wife and had to ask her if the those were baby milk jugs on the screen.  They were.  She turned it off, explained that she seriously thought it was a kids movie, even though now she saw that it was rated R and we both had a good laugh...

Nice recovery...

Yesterday wasn't a good day.  I was grumpy, I didn't write and the washing machine backed up through the toilet in the basement (which I discovered an hour later, after a stepping on a soaked carpet).

I filled up my car at Dillion's and as I drove up I saw a guy digging through a large pile of stuff in the middle of the parking lot.  Twenty feet away there was a truck with the tail gate down and with the bed of the truck half full of more stuff.  I thought they must've accidentally lost half their load driving up to a pump.  I got to another pump and as I filled up I noticed that they had a fire extinguisher, and some of the boxes were blackened and I could smell smoke.  I guess while moving, something lit something else on fire and well, a gas pump is the last place you want such things to happen.  I guess their day could've been worse.  At least they had a fire extinguisher handy.

Not sure why some days are just worse than others, but today was a good restart.  I only woke up tired rather than grumpy, I jotted down 1200 words and the carpet is dry.  Today was a good day...

A little farther...

I hit the end of week 2 of the couch to 5k today, and I also hit 50k words on my story today.  It seems like the more I write, the larger the story becomes.  I'm half way through a scene that I hadn't even thought up before it spilled out on the paper and now I'm at somewhat of a loss on what's happening.  But the more I write the more comfortable I am with the story doing its own thing.  It tends to be better than what I thought up.  Its richer! 

I just wish I were closer to being done and able to start on the next story.  I thought I'd be done by the end of this month, but its not going to happen.  Last week I eeked out nearly 8k words, and today I'm struggling to do 1k.  I wish I could consistently hit 2k+.  Maybe I need to take more time at home to get it done.  I never write on the weekends, or if I do, its to revise stuff I have already done. 

I have one more chapter to 'fix' that I wrote a couple years ago, and then I'll start letting my wife read through it and tell me what she thinks.  I'm wondering if she will like it.  It has some dark parts that I'm she'll not like much, but hopefully in the end she'll be intrigued enough to want to know what happens next in the story. 

But that's it.  Maybe I'll write a little more and get past this little detour and on to the big picture....

Unmotivation...

I'm sitting here, my alarm having just gone off even though I've been up for about 20 minutes after being woken up by nature calling.  Its Saturday and I'm suppose to be running day 2 of week 2 for the couch to 5k program and I'm just wanting to stay in bed.

I woke up at 1:30 thinking it was closer to 6:30, feeling fully rested, and asked DaNae what time it was (the clock is on her side of the bed).  I thought the night would never end at that point.  Now I'm tired and dragging and just want to curl up in a ball under a blanket and wake up again in a few hours.

I wanted to run yesterday but I had to get to work early so I could get off early to be at the doctor's for Charleigh's 4 month appointment.  It was worth it, but I seem to have more motivation to run on the days I can't.  That doesn't seem right.

Well I'm going to go run now regardless of how I feel, fully knowing I'll feel great afterwords, if not a little tired.  But its Saturday so I can go back to bed then if I want....

**Update**  I did it, feel great, even though the last 3 jogs felt a lost worse than the last time I ran.  My legs feel kinda tight, gonna have to stretch them some more, but I got back and my wife had some homemade egg mcbiscuits waiting for me in the oven!  MMmmmm...

Progess...

...it feels good.

I ran today for the second time this week.  I had planned on running Wednesday, but my legs were not as responsive after the Monday run.  Instead of killing myself in order to run and make myself hate it more, I withheld until today.  It felt good.  Well, actually much like last time, it felt great afterwards.  I was actually peppy at work!

I was peppy until I had to listen to a coworker rant and rave about how crappy life is.  He told me back at Halloween that he doesn't give out candy because he doesn't want to support all 'that demonic stuff'.  Then he told me last week that he stays up late on Thursdays because that's the night all his favorite shows are on TV, including the vampire diaries.  I've never seen the show but I'm assuming its not glorifying God or anything.    Seriously, this guy wears me down most days (lucky I only work with him 3 days a week) and I'm starting to see the areas of my life where he is rubbing off on me.  I'll have to put the kabosh to that. 

In other news, I think next month I'm setting a goal of not watching movies with my wife until she has seen it all the way through.  Just kidding.  I won't set that goal, but I think it might make our evenings more pleasant when we do watch a movie together.  Here's what usually happens....
1)movie starts.
2)danae falls asleep.
3)a large portion of the movie plays out on the screen.
4)danae wakes up.
5)danae asks questions, like 'who's that guy?'  'what's going on?'  'what did i miss?'
6)bill gets frustrated, just wants to watch the movie without explaining who's who and major/minor plot points.
7)bill refuses to talk to danae.
8)danae cries.
9)bill feels like an ass.
10)bill apologizes.
11)movie ends.

Okay, some of that is an exaggeration, and DaNae now has a beautiful little leach stuck to her chest part of the time and is watching the neighbor kid, so its not surprising she gets tired.  So I just need to suck it up and be a man and pause the movie every time her eyes shut, or at least find some other viable solution to enjoying the evenings with my wonderful wife...

Sigh....

..I did it.  I did my morning run.  I did it with a couple thin layers of clothes on, which at the beginning of the run felt good but by the end felt smothering.  I did several loops around Julie Dr. and 14th. St.  It didn't feel good. 

But I feel like a accomplished something today.  My legs feel a little bit like jell-o but not as much as the first time I ran five years ago (my legs were nearly non-responsive after that 3 mile jog).  I probably walk/ran a couple miles this morning and I feel good about the accomplishment. 

I will go forth again on wednesday, despite forecasts of rain/snow (well thats what my coworker told me the radio told him, isn't weather gossip just fabulous?) and try it again.  Hopefully strength and lung capacity increase with each one and life will be grand.

First Run Through...

...my block is tomorrow.  I'm going to get up early, empty my bowels and briskly walk for 5 minutes (possibly in the rain) before cycling between 60 seconds of jogging and 90 seconds of walking around my block.  I'm nervous.  What if I hate it?  What if I chicken out and decide to stay curled up in bed with my beautiful wife?  What if I fall over dead from the plague?

Well that last one hopefully won't happen in the next twelve hours so I have that to look forward to.  And well, if I really hate it, then I'll have to find some other exercise regimen I can fit into the my super small budget.  And I've already told my wife to kick me out of bed.  So no more fears.  On ward and around ward I will go...

Failure...

I'm kind of amazed that it has taken me 30+ years to start overcome the fear of failure.  Some days it feels like the older I get the more I fail. 

About two years ago I started working with a man who was teaching me his trade so that he could have a backup at work when he went on vacation or was sick.  There was a procedure he was working on that he told me I wasn't allowed to work on because I hadn't failed enough.  Yeah, thats right, I hadn't had enough failure in the lab.  His theory is that you learn more from the failures than through the successes.

This year has been a new experiment for me.  Each month I try a new resolution.  Something that I've wanted to do but haven't for whatever reason.  I think the biggest failure of my life is setting goals and not following through.  I think one of the reasons I started this blog was so that I can state my goal and the reasoning behind it.  And then of course have some accountability.  The accountability hasn't helped much since I'm not sure anyone even reads this, but the blog has helped inspire me to write more, which was numero uno (maybe april's goal should be to learn spanish so that I know more of it rather than just the number one) on my list of goals for the year.  

I decided for march that I would count calories, but I did it a couple years ago and I did well for a while.  Then the long term habits crept in.  Now after four days of not even starting the counting, I'm wondering if I need to begin again more intelligently.  But how?  I know over the last few days I have cut out about 500 daily calories.  Just little snacks that I ate every day which I don't need to.  After 7 days, thats a pound.  If I keep it up, I'll be losing one pound a week.  I do want to run though. I'll see how that goes on monday.  I might need to find a running buddy, which seemed to be the only thing that helped me in the past.  March might be a bigger learning experience than I anticipated...

40k

I've hit another milestone...it feels good.  I actually should've hit it last week, but I had a couple days of mega stress which knocked my brain loose for a few days. I think all combined I wrote a thousand words last week.  And the week before that I started rewriting a couple of the chapters I wrote a couple years back since they didn't really fit with what was happening in the story.  SO I wrote some and then deleted some which accounted for a net gain of about zero.

But I read this article last week of a lady who self publishes on Amazon.com.  She sells like 100,000 ebooks a month at like three bucks a pop. At 70% profits she makes a pretty sweet penny. So I started to look into what it would take to self publish.  It just takes money like so many other things.  With that in mind and all whole money situation at home, I'm looking into getting a part-time job.

It'll make life a little easier until the daycare goes into full swing, it'll help us reduce debt a little faster (woot) and help me self publish.  Then I'll just need to find a way to get my name out there once I do self publish.  I guess thats what facebook is partially for, and prayer.

All in all I'm more motivated to get this book done so I can work on the next...

March on good man...

New month...new goal. 

Its March, and I've already had two months of relative success with goals I've set.  The first month, I really wanted to consume less, produce more.  I was producing zero, so it wasn't hard to start producing more.  Then in February, I wanted to start producing even more and I didn't care about consumption anymore. 

Well now in March, I'm having to go back to the first goal of producing more and consuming less.  But rather than writing more and consuming less media, I want to physically consume less and produce some weight loss. 

I weighed myself this morning and I am up to 256 pounds.  I think my heaviest was reached after I got married at 260.  Right around our second year of marriage I dropped 35 pounds by calorie counting.  It felt great, but the whole calorie counting thing gets super tedious.  Especially if you are eating out or going to friends houses for dinner.  Well, we don't do either of those things, okay we got out on occasion, but not as regularly as we use to and I honestly couldn't tell you the last time we were invited to someone's house to eat (hope that's not a judge of our character).  To top it off, I eat the same thing for breakfast and lunch every day so it shouldn't be hard to calculate that and then only worry about what dinner brings. 

But I don't want to just eat less, I want to get more active too.  One thing I did the summer before DaNae and I met was run.  I loved it.  Actually I hated it when I did it, but I felt great afterwards.  I got up to 5 mile runs pretty quick, but I didn't feel like I improved in speed or anything.  SO rather than starting off with a three mile run like I did that summer, I'm going to take it slow and do the couch to 5k program.  Hopefully it'll help me build speed and endurance rather than just tearing me up. 

Now all I have to do is figure out my calorie intake goal and start jogging!  Monday will be the start of the jogging for me (I'm attempting to wake up earlier this week to be ready for early morning jogs) and I'll start the calorie thing tomorrow. 

P.S.  I'm not doing this as a means of reaching some glorious weight.  I want to just build better habits in my life.  Out with the old, in with the new!