Monthly Archives: January 2008

Old friend, new pet

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The past week was kind of crazy.

From early 1998 to early 2002, I was employed by AOL (also for about a month in ’97 before my bad car accident). On the whole, I generally enjoyed the job, and that’s in great part due to the people. I met Lisa there, and made some great friends. Lisa made some great friends too. One of them is an awesome guy named Shawn Storey. I didn’t know Shawn very well in my time at AOL, but I knew who he was, what his roles were, and had heard generally good things about him. As Lisa became good friends with him (and the rest of the training department), I feel like I got to know them fairly well as well. I don’t think I ever saw Shawn without a smile on his face.

I’m not sure of the exact details, but I believe that on Friday, January 4th, Shawn had a massive stroke. We got word of it on Tuesday, and we went and visited, but didn’t see anyone there. We went out for awhile on Wednesday night, and stayed there with him and his family for awhile. Lisa made a really awesome guest book/scrapbook on Thursday, and we took it up on Friday and spent several hours there with him and family. He’s in adult intensive care, and sleeps a lot, but is at least stable. Lisa went down and visited him again today.

It’s gotten together some of Lisa’s old coworkers, a lot of the people from training, as well as various other AOLers coming through to visit. It’s really quite amazing to see and hear about how many people have come to visit. If it’s your way, prayers and thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

In lighter news, we tried to adopt a new dog. Working with Lapdog Rescue, we brought the little dog named PokaDottie on that website into our home. The site lists her as a Terrier cross, but she didn’t exactly look like a terrier to us. We had her groomed, and our groomer said she thought that Dottie was a Chinese Crested. After digging out our ASPCA book, we agree. We kept her overnight, and she did start to fall for us, but something didn’t feel right. There was a bit too much aggression between her and Gryphon, and she was oddly loud and aggressive towards my parents-in-law. She wasn’t right for us, and we reluctantly had Lapdog Rescue pick her back up. She’s still listed as available, so if you’re looking for a cute and cuddly dog, she might be right for you, but she wasn’t for us.

We also learned through the dealings with a new dog that we’re really lucky with Gryphon. He’s an absolutely awesome dog with a great demeanor and we’ve fallen in love with him more than we ever thought we would have. Heck, we have pictures of him framed and hanging in the house. He’s really improved our lives and I’m glad we have him.

So, yeah, been quite the week. This week seems to be off to a calmer start, which is good.

If you knew Shawn and want more information, contact me personally via email/IM and we’ll talk more. Regardless, thoughts and prayers are greatly appreciated, both by us and his family.

New Year’s Goals, 2008 Edition

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So, while I sit here waiting for a rather large backup to complete, I figured I might as well push out a post with some thoughts for the new year.

While 2007 was really a great and eye-opening year in several ways, there was something that didn’t seem quite right to me. Normally I get more excited over my birthday and Christmas, and I didn’t quite get into things at all last year. 2008 seems to be shaping up differently, as I’m already feeling some excitement about my birthday and such.

One major thing that I accomplished last year was a bit of weight loss. I’m fairly sure that I started the year at 255 pounds — not exactly the lightest person. My doc recommended working on weight loss to help with my gout, and he also recommended Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink. It’s a book talking about all of the decisions that we make relating to food each day, and how we do an awful lot of mindless eating.

By employing some simple techniques from the book, and just being more conscious of portion sizes, I’ve managed to lose some weight. I was down to 240 by the start of the holiday season, and I managed to hold my weight at 240 even through the massive food holidays. While I felt like I’d hit a plateau at 240, I’m noticing that my weight is starting to move down again, albeit it slowly. I can safely say I’m stable at 238 at this point, give or take a pound, and that makes me extremely happy.

So, one of my major goals for the year is to keep the streak up, and to keep the weight going down. If I can pull off even just one pound a week (which seems to be my current rate) then I can possibly get down to 200. Honestly, I don’t expect that, because even when I was weightlifting on a regular basis in school, I couldn’t get below 230. Then again, I was also eating much more worse at the time, so hey.

My other major goal this year is to work on my creative side. I realized over 2007 that I was really lacking on creative outlet. I haven’t played real music (as much as I love it, Rock Band doesn’t count) in years, I’d stopped drawing, and my blogging went down. Life got into a real rut and I need to get out of that.

Last year, a friend was all excited about Project 365, and was taking at least one picture a day. I got jazzed about it, tried to do it myself, got about 13 days in and missed a day, and that was that. Doing something every day isn’t really reasonable at this point, so I’m modifying it. I’m trying to do something creative — and it doesn’t have to be photography, but any form of outlet — at least once a week. It’s only been two weeks, but I’ve managed to do quite well.

Example: On January 4th (I think, could have been 5th I guess), my nephew Isaac got on the phone when Lisa called me and was very excited because “Uncle, we got you a truck!” I was amused, thinking he meant a small Hot Wheels truck or something similar, but what he actually meant was a little unpainted wooden truck. They also bought some paint, and we all got together and painted various wooden toys. It was really quite fun. I really wish I’d taken a picture of the truck.

I’ve also been experimenting with our old Canon Powershot A70, and am getting a better understanding of what the various terms mean, and also learning how to manually adjust exposure, aperture, ISO, and even manual focus — which is really painful because I can’t easily adjust it with a ring or anything, but it’s a start. I’m sure I’ll be uploading more at some point. I’ve easily taken 50 photos in the last two weeks.

Something about only requiring once a week makes it easier, I guess!

So, not a lot of goals — weight loss and more creativity — but I like it.

You’ll note that I’m not saying resolutions, but goals. It’s really just semantics, and they’re effectively the same, but by viewing them as goals, I’m hoping that I can approach it from a more long-term sense, as opposed to simply something I want to do with myself in the new year.