Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Signs from Above
Yesterday, I decided to go to the gym for the first time in months. I don't know what spurred that thought. Maybe it was the fact that I'm going to be graduating in a few months and want to look good for my commencement speech. Maybe it's that I'm starting a new job tomorrow, so I want to start looking good for that. More likely, it's that I'm going to a water park in the Wisconsin Dells this weekend and think I can lose 50 pounds in 3 days.
I belong to Bally's and have had a membership for almost 6 years now. I used to go every morning when I worked in the suburbs and lived in the city. Traffic going out of the city was just the absolute worst. It could take me 1.5 hours to get to work in the morning when it would only take 30 minutes without any traffic. So I decided to wake up early and go to the gym in the suburbs on my way to work. Every morning for almost 2 years, I woke up at 5:00 and went to the gym. I had two motivations. One was beating traffic. The other was getting a woman, since I was newly single.
Well, a couple years later, I was unemployed and engaged. That pretty much stopped my trips to the gym. No traffic to beat and no women to impress. (I love how getting married, or even dating someone, totally ruins your desire to look presentable. If there were no such thing as divorce, I'd probably weigh 600 pounds right now. But I have to keep myself under 300 just in case The Wife decides she's had it with my fat ass.)
I've been to the gym here and there over the last few years. I'll generally get in the mood to get in shape for a few weeks or months. Then I'll go on a 2 week ice-cream-eating bender. I'll go straight from Dairy Queen to Culver's to Baskin Robbins. By the end of the two weeks, I'm snorting sprinkles and main-lining Blizzards.
So yesterday, I decided to go to the gym. Of course, I was running late and realized that I'd only be able to do abotu 15-20 minutes on the treadmill. Given how much exercise I've had lately, I figured it was better than nothing. When I get to Bally's, I go to the locker room to put my stuff away. Since I was going to be heading straight to school after the gym, I brought all my clothes and planned on showering at the gym. The problem was that the showers weren't there anymore. Shit, I'd been away from this gym for WAY too long.
The way the locker room is set up is that there are a bunch of lockers (shocker, I know) all around. To the right, there a 3-sink vanity that extends the length of the wall. At the end of the wall, there's a door that leads to the showers and sauna. Well, there was a plywood wall that prohibited entry to the vanity and the showers. D'oh!
I walked to the front desk where I found out that the showers were in fact operational. You just had to access them through the pool area. Okay, that's not bad. At least I don't have to drive 15 minutes back home to take a shower. So I do my 15 minutes on the treadmill and head to the locker room to shower. I thought about undressing and sauntering over to the shower in just a towel. Then I thought I'd be arrested and charged with ugliness. I packed a bag and headed past to pool the showers. I got undressed and got under one of the 6 showers. I turned the knob and got nothing. Shit. I walked to the next one. Still nothing. Double shit. The next nozzle? I got a trickle of water. Hmmm. I can make this work. Kind of.
I managed to shower and get out of there on time. But I think there's a lesson here. It's that someone doesn't want me to work out. Someone's making this harder on me than it needs to be. Because someone doesn't want me to lose weight. And that someone is me.
I belong to Bally's and have had a membership for almost 6 years now. I used to go every morning when I worked in the suburbs and lived in the city. Traffic going out of the city was just the absolute worst. It could take me 1.5 hours to get to work in the morning when it would only take 30 minutes without any traffic. So I decided to wake up early and go to the gym in the suburbs on my way to work. Every morning for almost 2 years, I woke up at 5:00 and went to the gym. I had two motivations. One was beating traffic. The other was getting a woman, since I was newly single.
Well, a couple years later, I was unemployed and engaged. That pretty much stopped my trips to the gym. No traffic to beat and no women to impress. (I love how getting married, or even dating someone, totally ruins your desire to look presentable. If there were no such thing as divorce, I'd probably weigh 600 pounds right now. But I have to keep myself under 300 just in case The Wife decides she's had it with my fat ass.)
I've been to the gym here and there over the last few years. I'll generally get in the mood to get in shape for a few weeks or months. Then I'll go on a 2 week ice-cream-eating bender. I'll go straight from Dairy Queen to Culver's to Baskin Robbins. By the end of the two weeks, I'm snorting sprinkles and main-lining Blizzards.
So yesterday, I decided to go to the gym. Of course, I was running late and realized that I'd only be able to do abotu 15-20 minutes on the treadmill. Given how much exercise I've had lately, I figured it was better than nothing. When I get to Bally's, I go to the locker room to put my stuff away. Since I was going to be heading straight to school after the gym, I brought all my clothes and planned on showering at the gym. The problem was that the showers weren't there anymore. Shit, I'd been away from this gym for WAY too long.
The way the locker room is set up is that there are a bunch of lockers (shocker, I know) all around. To the right, there a 3-sink vanity that extends the length of the wall. At the end of the wall, there's a door that leads to the showers and sauna. Well, there was a plywood wall that prohibited entry to the vanity and the showers. D'oh!
I walked to the front desk where I found out that the showers were in fact operational. You just had to access them through the pool area. Okay, that's not bad. At least I don't have to drive 15 minutes back home to take a shower. So I do my 15 minutes on the treadmill and head to the locker room to shower. I thought about undressing and sauntering over to the shower in just a towel. Then I thought I'd be arrested and charged with ugliness. I packed a bag and headed past to pool the showers. I got undressed and got under one of the 6 showers. I turned the knob and got nothing. Shit. I walked to the next one. Still nothing. Double shit. The next nozzle? I got a trickle of water. Hmmm. I can make this work. Kind of.
I managed to shower and get out of there on time. But I think there's a lesson here. It's that someone doesn't want me to work out. Someone's making this harder on me than it needs to be. Because someone doesn't want me to lose weight. And that someone is me.
Icky Mettle
On a whim, I popped in Archers of Loaf's Icky Mettle (their first album) today. I forgot what a great album it is and what a shame that bands today can't make albums like this. The Archers of Loaf are certainly a weird band, an acquired taste, if you will. But they flat out rawk and this album is one of my all-time favorites.
The Archers of Loaf aren't for everyone. I didn't even much care for them when I first started listening to them. I remember thinking that the singer has a weird voice. How weird? Let's just say that Simon Cowell wouldn't let him go to Hollywood with it. It's very gravelly, and he screams a lot. It also seems a bit out of tune, but that's what I like about it. It's different enough to stand out from the crowd, to be noticed. But it's not different enough to suck (I'm looking at you Pantera).
What got me hooked on the Archers of Loaf is what gets me hooked on almost all my favorite bands, the guitar riffs. The Archers excelled at this. They knew how to craft songs that made you bob your head along. They also knew how to propel songs forward, to make you anticipate the next note. This can best be exemplified on "Toast." It starts out as a simple song with the guitar strumming a few notes in the background. But you can feel the bass and drums just itching to play faster. And so you start itching for it yourself. But the song keeps going slow. Now you're just dying for them to rock it out. And they just keep playing it slow. And when you just can't handle it anymore, they unleash the noise, giving you everything you were waiting for and more.
I've said it before, but the Archers of Loaf are one of my top 5 bands, and Icky Mettle is one of my favorite albums of all-time. It has plenty of guitar riffs. It has slower songs. It has fast songs. It has sing-a-longs. It has air-guitar-worthy songs. It was one of my favorite CDs to play in my Jeep with the top down. (My #1 favorite Jeep CD was The Reverend Horton Heat's The Full Custom Gospel Sounds of the Reverend Horton Heat.) And as far as I'm concerned, it ranks right up there with Exile on Main Street and Surfer Rosa as one of the best albums of all time.
The Archers of Loaf aren't for everyone. I didn't even much care for them when I first started listening to them. I remember thinking that the singer has a weird voice. How weird? Let's just say that Simon Cowell wouldn't let him go to Hollywood with it. It's very gravelly, and he screams a lot. It also seems a bit out of tune, but that's what I like about it. It's different enough to stand out from the crowd, to be noticed. But it's not different enough to suck (I'm looking at you Pantera).
What got me hooked on the Archers of Loaf is what gets me hooked on almost all my favorite bands, the guitar riffs. The Archers excelled at this. They knew how to craft songs that made you bob your head along. They also knew how to propel songs forward, to make you anticipate the next note. This can best be exemplified on "Toast." It starts out as a simple song with the guitar strumming a few notes in the background. But you can feel the bass and drums just itching to play faster. And so you start itching for it yourself. But the song keeps going slow. Now you're just dying for them to rock it out. And they just keep playing it slow. And when you just can't handle it anymore, they unleash the noise, giving you everything you were waiting for and more.
I've said it before, but the Archers of Loaf are one of my top 5 bands, and Icky Mettle is one of my favorite albums of all-time. It has plenty of guitar riffs. It has slower songs. It has fast songs. It has sing-a-longs. It has air-guitar-worthy songs. It was one of my favorite CDs to play in my Jeep with the top down. (My #1 favorite Jeep CD was The Reverend Horton Heat's The Full Custom Gospel Sounds of the Reverend Horton Heat.) And as far as I'm concerned, it ranks right up there with Exile on Main Street and Surfer Rosa as one of the best albums of all time.
What was that? Rewind it!
I live in the digital world, and it's destroying my life. In the past year or so, I've started using 2 products that have totally altered the way I do things. The first is TiVo, which changed my viewing habits. The other is iPod, which completely changed my listening habits.
The main attraction of these two things is that I can pause them at any time if I need a break, or I can rewind them if I miss something. (I've been listening to the Howard Stern show a lot on my iPod. Believe me, I wouldn't rewind a song to hear Journey sing the chorus to "Wheels in the Sky" again.) The problem is that I've started to think that I should be able to rewind or pause EVERYTHING.
I first noticed this in my Accounting class the other day. My professor is a nice guy, but he's a low-talker. I can hardly ever hear him. Of course, it doesn't help that I sit in the back of the class, next to the very noisy heater. It probably also doesn't help that I'm ruining my hearing with my iPod. (Thanks for the heads-up, Pete Townsend. I never would have figured out that listening to very loud headphones for hours a day might affect my hearing. Go "research" more kiddie porn, you jerk.) Anyway, my professor actually said something mildly important, and I missed it. The first thing I thought was "I'll just hit the 15-second rewind button." The second thing I thought was what a big moron I was.
This weekend, I went up to the Cabin in Wisconsin. We have the satellite dish up there, which is nice. There was a free Starz preview weekend, so I watched a couple movies. Kill Bill, vol. 1 was on, so I was watching that. Luke started getting antsy and wanted to go to bed. I grabbed the remote and reached for the pause button before realizing there wasn't one. And all I could think about was how uncivilized it was to not be able to pause live TV. I guess this is what they call "roughing it."
I've had similar problems with my iPod. Howard Stern's new show is on Sirius satellite radio and they have about 5 minutes of commercials every hour. Well, they have commercials, but I don't. I just skip right past them. This has caused me a lot of problems when I try to listen to regular radio. This weekend, I tried to fast forward past the commercials on WAPL (the Rockin' Apple, Appleton's great radio station). When I couldn't, I just threw on my 90's playlist on my iPod. I think I might be done with commercial radio. My iPod has officially ruined me.
The main attraction of these two things is that I can pause them at any time if I need a break, or I can rewind them if I miss something. (I've been listening to the Howard Stern show a lot on my iPod. Believe me, I wouldn't rewind a song to hear Journey sing the chorus to "Wheels in the Sky" again.) The problem is that I've started to think that I should be able to rewind or pause EVERYTHING.
I first noticed this in my Accounting class the other day. My professor is a nice guy, but he's a low-talker. I can hardly ever hear him. Of course, it doesn't help that I sit in the back of the class, next to the very noisy heater. It probably also doesn't help that I'm ruining my hearing with my iPod. (Thanks for the heads-up, Pete Townsend. I never would have figured out that listening to very loud headphones for hours a day might affect my hearing. Go "research" more kiddie porn, you jerk.) Anyway, my professor actually said something mildly important, and I missed it. The first thing I thought was "I'll just hit the 15-second rewind button." The second thing I thought was what a big moron I was.
This weekend, I went up to the Cabin in Wisconsin. We have the satellite dish up there, which is nice. There was a free Starz preview weekend, so I watched a couple movies. Kill Bill, vol. 1 was on, so I was watching that. Luke started getting antsy and wanted to go to bed. I grabbed the remote and reached for the pause button before realizing there wasn't one. And all I could think about was how uncivilized it was to not be able to pause live TV. I guess this is what they call "roughing it."
I've had similar problems with my iPod. Howard Stern's new show is on Sirius satellite radio and they have about 5 minutes of commercials every hour. Well, they have commercials, but I don't. I just skip right past them. This has caused me a lot of problems when I try to listen to regular radio. This weekend, I tried to fast forward past the commercials on WAPL (the Rockin' Apple, Appleton's great radio station). When I couldn't, I just threw on my 90's playlist on my iPod. I think I might be done with commercial radio. My iPod has officially ruined me.
Monday, February 20, 2006
What a Weekend!
I had a pretty fun weekend, isolated from humanity. The Wife had a bridal shower and bachelorette party, so I figured I'd take the opportunity to head up to Wisconsin for the weekend. My family has a cabin on Lake Winnebago. I like to head up there every few weeks to get away from it all. In this case, though, I didn't really get away from much because I took Luke and the dog with me. (The dog puked on the way up, of course. Good way to start the weekend.)
I drove up Friday night in 30 MPH headwinds. That was great for my mileage. The BFT, which normally averages 16-17 MPG on the highway got closer to 13. God. That just makes me want to shoot myself. Or get a Prius. Not only was it windy, but it was COLD. The thermometer in my car read -7 when I arrived.
Thursday night, our place in WI got about 10 inches of snow. But with all the wind, there were quite a few snowdrifts. Our driveway is 3 cars wide. The northern side had almost no snow. The southern side had drifts of 2-3 feet. Fortunately, with the BFT, I was able to launch myself into the snow with no problem.
I got out of the car and got Luke's pack-and-play (a portable crib) out and set it up inside before taking him in and putting him to sleep. I headed back outside wearing just a thermal fleece. It was literally no more than 30 feet to my car. I only made on trip. I felt like Luke Skywalker on the ice planet Hoth. I could just picture myself trying to make the trip from the truck to the house and just collapsing, reaching out, screaming "Ben" and then being saved by my son riding Mocha, who he sliced open and put me in to keeep me warm.
Anywho. I decided to put a coat on to grab the few remaining things from my truck. After a couple of trips, I sat down inside and turned on the TV. That's when I noticed that my hands were tingling. From just a minute or so outside. Scary. I turned on the news and found out that the wind chill was -35. Brrr Green Bay!
Since it didn't warm up much on Saturday or Sunday, I didn't spend much time outside. Luke and I just played around inside the house. We did venture out to the gas station/restaurant to buy a lottery ticket. The jackpot was $365 million and I couldn't let that just go by. (Of course, some jerk in Nebraska won it instead of me. Jerk.)
I love this gas station by the way. It's in Stockbridge, which has a population of a couple hundred people. It's THE gas station. The only one for miles, actually. And of course, it has a full diner in it. It's where all the locals hang out. And it's run by an Indian guy. He couldn't stick out more if he tried. I'm not a racist guy. I've been coming to this house in WI for 30 years now. It's quite a rural area, filled with rednecks. And one Indian guy, who runs the gas station. Did Citgo move him up here? Did he draw the short straw? I mean, how does an Indian guy end up in rural WI running a gas station? These are things I want to know.
Anyway, it was a nice relaxing weekend for me, even though I didn't win the lottery. The good news, though, is that the Illinois game, Megamillions, is creeping closer and closer to $200 million. I still have a chance at becoming a multi-millionaire. Because we all know I'm not going to get there through hard work.
I drove up Friday night in 30 MPH headwinds. That was great for my mileage. The BFT, which normally averages 16-17 MPG on the highway got closer to 13. God. That just makes me want to shoot myself. Or get a Prius. Not only was it windy, but it was COLD. The thermometer in my car read -7 when I arrived.
Thursday night, our place in WI got about 10 inches of snow. But with all the wind, there were quite a few snowdrifts. Our driveway is 3 cars wide. The northern side had almost no snow. The southern side had drifts of 2-3 feet. Fortunately, with the BFT, I was able to launch myself into the snow with no problem.
I got out of the car and got Luke's pack-and-play (a portable crib) out and set it up inside before taking him in and putting him to sleep. I headed back outside wearing just a thermal fleece. It was literally no more than 30 feet to my car. I only made on trip. I felt like Luke Skywalker on the ice planet Hoth. I could just picture myself trying to make the trip from the truck to the house and just collapsing, reaching out, screaming "Ben" and then being saved by my son riding Mocha, who he sliced open and put me in to keeep me warm.
Anywho. I decided to put a coat on to grab the few remaining things from my truck. After a couple of trips, I sat down inside and turned on the TV. That's when I noticed that my hands were tingling. From just a minute or so outside. Scary. I turned on the news and found out that the wind chill was -35. Brrr Green Bay!
Since it didn't warm up much on Saturday or Sunday, I didn't spend much time outside. Luke and I just played around inside the house. We did venture out to the gas station/restaurant to buy a lottery ticket. The jackpot was $365 million and I couldn't let that just go by. (Of course, some jerk in Nebraska won it instead of me. Jerk.)
I love this gas station by the way. It's in Stockbridge, which has a population of a couple hundred people. It's THE gas station. The only one for miles, actually. And of course, it has a full diner in it. It's where all the locals hang out. And it's run by an Indian guy. He couldn't stick out more if he tried. I'm not a racist guy. I've been coming to this house in WI for 30 years now. It's quite a rural area, filled with rednecks. And one Indian guy, who runs the gas station. Did Citgo move him up here? Did he draw the short straw? I mean, how does an Indian guy end up in rural WI running a gas station? These are things I want to know.
Anyway, it was a nice relaxing weekend for me, even though I didn't win the lottery. The good news, though, is that the Illinois game, Megamillions, is creeping closer and closer to $200 million. I still have a chance at becoming a multi-millionaire. Because we all know I'm not going to get there through hard work.
