Archive for June, 2006

Tommy remarked that driving into the San Elijo Hills town center is like driving into the Truman Show. Everything looks brand new, and it appears out of nowhere. When he said this two years ago this was definitely the case. Out of the chaparral wilderness sprang a spring surrounded by a well-manicured lawn. That same fountain that welcomes the thirsty traveler also calls to the budding geocacher.

This is now the closest geocache to my home. It’s also a great geocache to introduce friends in the area to the sport. This was a quick “cache ‘n dash.” I stood back a bit and let my Spencer and Jamie do most of the hunting. Their reaction to the caching experience: excitement with a desire for more!

It has been at least a year since Krissy and I first decided that we wanted to draft a mission statement for ourselves and for our future family members. It’s amazing how quickly time passes when something difficult has no deadline. We worked on this for a long time. We must have written a total of ten pages worth of things that were good and that we wanted. We then condensed all of those ideas down to the principles upon which they rested. We found it difficult to achieve a balance between the specific and the general. I was thinking too much about rules at the beginning, making up a long list of dos and don’ts. I don’t know how we did it, but we eventually settled on this wording. What made it easier to call it finished was our realization that this is only a first draft. Version 1.0 is bound to have a few bugs and I’m confident that there will be a version 1.1 in the not too distant future.

We were reluctant to hang this up when we were finished. This document represents the ideal, and once it was on the wall it somehow gained a greater place of importance for us. We couldn’t do certain things anymore because we had agreed to the mission of the Family now. Scripture reading needed to come before television. That’s what the document on the wall said should happen. What we always knew we should do is now there in black and white reminding us. We still aren’t perfect and I don’t plan on getting there any time soon, but at least I have a better idea of how to get closer to that goal.

Mission statements aren’t for everyone and they are certainly going to be different from family to family based on individual strengths and weaknesses. If you are interested in creating one with your family there are several resources available. If you decide to do this or if you have done this already let me know how it went in the comments.

Let’s face it. I live a pretty sedentary lifestyle and I eat as if I were a linebacker. I was the kind of guy who lost weight on his mission because that was the most exercise I’d ever gotten in my life. I like food. I don’t like exercise. My hobbies include reading, playing video games, and programming. Geocaching is good, but that’s not even close to enough exercise to do me much good. Since getting married I’ve taken to eating two servings worth of everything Krissy and I cook. When I went to see the doctor for a physical his exact words were: “You don’t smoke. You don’t drink alcohol or coffee. You don’t lead a risky lifestyle. Nope… weight will be your nemesis.

My cholesterol is too high and I need to lose weight. Krissy and I attended a class this evening aimed at educating unhealthy people about healthy eating habits specifically geared toward lowering high cholesterol levels. We were given a charge to document all of our food intake in a week and to then compare that to our goals and see where we might improve. They gave us a sheet of paper upon which to track our eating habits. There was no way I was going to let things go on paper where the information would languish in uselessness. When we returned home I immediately set out looking for Free Software to track my food intake and my progress over the next few months.

The first thing I found was Gnutrition. This software looked promising at first. It includes information from the FDA on over five thousand different foods and allows one to track progress and plan meals. Unfortunately the most recent release of the software was in 2001 and I couldn’t even get it to compile. I found a few other applications for nutritional information, but none of them allowed tracking of eating habits, which was what I really wanted.

When I first thought about using my geek talents to get healthy I thought that there ought to be a website that would allow me to keep track of these things no matter where I was so I could hop online and update it. I thought that something like a “Google Diet” sounded like a good idea. I guess I wasn’t the only one that thought that might be a good idea. In searching for Free Software I found a free website called FitDay. FitDay is a free online nutrition and exercise tracking system. It allows setting goals and seeing how much fat, calories, and nutrients are being ingested.

As far as exercise goes, I am a complete novice. I have no clue where to start, what to do, or how long to do it for. For people like me RunFatBoy.net was created. The site’s not quite done yet, but it looks like it’s just what I need to get started and to get my stomach to stop spilling out over my pants.

Getting in shape and healthy may not be fun, but it can be just as geeky as you want it to be. And if you’re me then that’s very geeky indeed.

I have had my share of problems with companies and institutions calling multiple times in a day trying to get ahold of either me or my wife, but this voting season has been the worst yet. Tomorrow is the primary election in California and I have received nearly eight telephone calls so far today with pre-recorded messages from well-known supporters of candidates and candidates themselves urging me to vote for one or the other or this way or that on a proposition.

Will it ever stop?

Of course it will stop. Sometime around June 7th when the election is over. The best part of all this is that I’m registered as a permanent absentee voter, and I’ve already mailed in my ballot. Of course, I dislike the volume of messages I’ve received so much that I wish I could have my ballot back just so I could vote against these old-school spammers.

The National Do Not Call Registry has been a success for me and my family. We have received almost no unsolicited calls since then except for the political advertisements preceding this election. You see, the politicians that drafted this bill made a nice exception for themselves making it impossible to penalize them for telemarketing. “It’s not covered because it’s not a sales call” they say. How is it not a sales call? All they are doing is trying to sell themselves and their friends.

I did a little research and found that they are most likely calling all the numbers that are registered with their political party. I am going to have to re-register and put some bogus number on there if I’m ever going to get this to stop. I can try to track down all the organizations that are using that number to boost their candidates’ numbers and ask them to please stop calling, but they are in no way obligated to do so and there are just so many that it’s not worth it.

We need a new law against this behavior. I would love to just vote against everyone who is doing this, but that is often impractical. The best candidate in most important regards is rarely the one who is not advertised through telephone solicitations. In some categories I have received calls backing all of the candidates that are running. Then what am I supposed to do? Not voting is out of the question. I have no obvious recourse available.

I can only hope that they don’t get ahold of my email address.